A/N: Yes, I know Sheldon's middle name is 'Lee' but read on and I'll explain everything in a later chapter.
Reparata
"Priya, why are you just sitting there? Go! Go be with him. He may be…he may be dying as we speak and here you sit, almost disinterested. Are you in shock? Can you drive?"
Priya closed the lid of her laptop effectively severing the connection. Dying? Sheldon?
She turned on her phone and saw several voicemails but opted to call her brother directly rather than waste time. It went directly to voicemail and she figured if he was at the hospital he couldn't use his cell phone.
Her mother was right. She was too nervous to drive. Her brother and his best friend, her faux fiancée, were injured.
Rajesh must not be badly hurt if he would call our father but that meant – Sheldon?
She banged on the door of 4B and when Penny opened the door Priya blurted out "Rajesh and Sheldon-jaan have been hurt in an explosion. I am too upset to drive. Please, please drive me to the hospital?"
"Let me change clothes. I was cleaning the bathroom. An explosion? How badly were they hurt? Is he – I mean, are they going to be all right?"
Penny had images cascading through her mind of Sheldon lying, broken, among the remains of his office, his beautiful mind and body, bloody and broken.
"Penny, I don't have any details, just that there was an accident. Please hurry. He might be dying and – "
"Don't say that! Don't ever say that! He has to be okay, he just has to be!" Both women had tears in their eyes and for just a second each knew the other's thoughts.
'She has real feelings for him!'
Pasadena General Hospital
Rajesh slipped into the exam area where they'd taken Sheldon. They had both been knocked around pretty good by the blast wave when the power supply to the COIL-gas laser exploded and sent a massive energy pulse through the unfocused laser device. They'd both been hit by a millisecond pulse of some kind of energy and immediately lost consciousness.
"Sheldon Cooper, wake up. Sheldon, it is I, Rajesh Koothrappali. You are in Pasadena and we were in an accident. Now tell me, Sheldon, because it is incredibly important how you answer this question: What is your middle name?"
He leaned over his friend, careful not to entangle his IV tubes and monitoring gadgets with his own. "Sheldon – what is your middle name? Sheldon – "
"Quit shouting. My middle name is…my middle name is…" He seemed to be concerned about the occupants of the room.
"We are alone, my friend, but not for long. Your middle name is – "
"Leland. Sheldon Leland Cooper. I'm still here and I'm still me, Raj. You – were injured? Winkle? An explosion and when I first woke up I thought maybe I'd – "
"Displaced? No, my friend. We, you and I, were knocked out by the pulse. Winkle was behind the shield at the controls. I think she overloaded the COIL-gas unit and it blew up most spectacularly. She is down the hall unless my ears fail me. Her profanity-laced descriptions of the heritage of the medical staff are most unpleasant but memorable."
"Why are we still here?" He hurt all over.
"Apparently the radiation alarms were triggered and you and I are here in quarantine until our blood work and MRI results are back."
"Well, at least we got a free physical. I wonder if they'll let me have a copy of the MRI on disc? I would like to see the magnificence that is my brain. They never let me see it when my mother had me tested." Of course that wasn't the last time he'd been tested, just the first time and that was long ago.
"Doctor Koothrappali! Get back into your bed this instant!"
Raj turned and looked at the figure in the protective suit, her voice booming out through a speaker mounted on her chest. He kinda liked it. Being able to ogle under the guise of listening intently to the loudspeaker. She was very pretty and he could just make out her hair color through the face shield of the Class IV protective suit. Every cloud did have a silver lining, after all.
"He cannot speak around beautiful women. It is conversion hysteria from an early encounter with a transvestite as near as we can ascertain. Bring him a Grasshopper, however, and he'll talk your ear and clothes off you. You have been warned."
"You two are very popular. There's a horde of people waiting for word about you. I think at least one of them is a lawyer given the way she's walking back and forth. She reminds me of a shark in an aquarium.'
They both looked at each other and then said as one voice: "Priya".
Raj noted a change in Sheldon's facial expression. Gone was the arrogant man he knew his friend to be and instead there was a softening of his features that he only saw before when Penny had broken up with Leonard the first time.
'Perhaps there is more going on in the apartment than meets the eye? Priya, do you know what you're doing?' thought Raj.
"I'd better go with this beautiful Florence Nightingale before she threatens me with some physically invasive procedure. I will talk with Priya if I am able. You, my friend, look like you were trampled by elephants, dragged for miles through the jungle by water buffalo and finally left in the sun for a few days."
"I'm not the only one with the sudden 'tan', Raj. You look like you were dipped in red paint. What level of radiation were we exposed to? Great Isaac Newton, we may have only hours or days to live, Rajesh, and I have not yet won my Nobel Prize!"
"The Gods are jealous of their secrets, Sheldon. Perhaps cold fusion should be left to others to discover. Between us, I think Winkle's 'adjustments' to our original plan may have caused the accident. That woman never leaves well enough alone! She is worse than Leonard."
"The government is going to have a fit over this. One failure after another. We'll lose our grant money and – "
"Oh, no! That means I'll be deported to India. Sheldon, I cannot bear India for more than a few weeks at a time. The cow dung in the streets, the constant congestion, the crowds…there are almost a billion of us now and India is such a small country – "
"Raj, your family is rich and you live in a gated community in the suburbs in a huge mansion so please, dial the drama down a notch. No one is going to be deported…"
"Easy for you to say. All they will do is hand you a bus ticket and send you back to Texas."