So don't even ask where I got this idea. I have no flippin' clue. I sat down here to try and write another fic idea I have, and this just…showed up.
DISCLAIMER: I guess I own Ricky, but I don't like him. Nothing else. If I owned these characters you'd be watching my fics, not reading them.
Leonard's mind was developed thinking higher thoughts. He was born into a family of respected scientists, with an exceptionally smart older sister and an equally intelligent younger brother still to come. He knew from a young age that he was the academically weak one in his family, but at the same time it wasn't insulting at all to be dumb for a Hofstadter. That's what his Uncle Floyd told him, anyway.
He spent his Christmases presenting papers, and never had a birthday party. His born instinct to want answers, combined with the family he grew up with, made him look for…want…need a scientific explanation for everything. If something couldn't be supported by scientific fact or reputable scientific theory, then it was silly, mere superstition of the lesser minds.
When he was twelve, he fell into a "sort of" friendship with a guy called Ricky, who was probably smarter than Leonard but not in the league of Michael or his sister. On Sundays in the winter, Ricky's sister Jana, who had a car but no place to go as the beaches were closed, would take Leonard and Ricky to a science center or a museum, which Leonard was allowed to go to as long as he came home with a paper. On a Sunday just shy of Leonard's thirteenth birthday, he and Ricky came out of the museum a half an hour before Jana was supposed to be there to get them. They had a plan.
On the previous outing, Ricky had noticed a small building less than a block from the museum. It was a run down, brick building with an ugly green roof and way too much foliage climbing up the walls. "Psychic Readings, Five Dollars," the sign had read.
"Look at that," Ricky had said. "Psychics. If their gifts were real, then why wouldn't they charge more than a measly five bucks for a reading?"
Leonard had laughed. "They can't charge more than twenty bucks or we could sue them for scamming us, so logic would dictate they charge eighteen or nineteen dollars for a reading, yet they still charge five because they know these "mystical powers" don't actually exist."
"We should go."
"What?"
"Next week. Let's go get psychic readings."
Leonard had snorted. "You don't seriously believe in that stuff, do you?"
"Of course not. Psychics, crystals, voodoo…it's crap. But we'd get a laugh out of it."
So here they were, money in hand, walking toward that run down brick building with the ugly green roof and way too much foliage climbing up the walls, to actually get a psychic reading. Leonard felt ridiculous doing it, and he knew Ricky did too, but this would make an interesting topic for this week's paper if he had the guts to admit that he actually went to a psychic. He could say he was doing it in the name of science-but that always sounded better coming from his siblings than from him.
"On moving day, you will meet the love of your life."
Leonard and Ricky had laughed all the way home about that one. Ricky's reading had been fairly boring, the typical "you will have wealth and be loved," but Leonard's, being more specific, had been so utterly ridiculous that for the next six months, until Ricky moved away, the teenagers laughed about it. Leonard wasn't planning on moving too many times in his life, and the odds of meeting someone he would love-that seemed farfetched in itself-on that specific day was ludicrous. Leonard figured that by the time he grew old enough to move anywhere the psychic would be long gone, so she felt sure enough of herself to give him that prediction.
And that sentence kept proving the psychic wrong, strengthening Leonard's already strong opinion that psychics were frauds.
When Leonard moved into his dorm room at college, the people he met that day were faculty members or those bullies that still, at eighteen, found it funny to take his glasses. That night Leonard thought of the psychics words and laughed to himself.
When Leonard got his own apartment, the only people he met were the eighty-something year old landlady who died shortly after, and the garbage man who smelled like garlic. He sure wasn't going to fall in love with any of them, either.
The day he checked out apartment 4A he'd met Sheldon and the transvestite next door, but the windy day in 2003 that he actually moved in, he met no one new. Proof, Leonard thought to himself, that the psychic gave him such a specific reading because she knew he'd never be able to track her down and expose her for the fraud she was.
Not so fast.
Seven years later, Leonard is standing in his lab at the university, looking down at a smeared dot on his hand that Howard had put there moments earlier. He looks at the door that the latter has just exited through. He thinks about what he wants to do, and suddenly something hits him.
Throughout the years, Leonard had always used that single incident as his proof that psychics were frauds. But the psychic never said to him "On your moving day, you will meet the love of your life."
He finds her in the laundry room. He apologizes. He's starting to feel that, for once, a psychic was right.
Please tell me what you think, good or bad!