Okay, this is a LONG one, but pretty important as well. If you prefer short chapters, I'm sorry. If you like long ones, you're welcome.

Also, something I forgot to mention last chapter: this is now officially my most reviewed story ever (former record stood for almost three years)! Thank you all so much!

Sheldon Cooper was, in every sense of the phrase, a hard-working man. He took great pride in his career, both in regards to his many noteworthy contributions to the science world and as a means of supporting his family. Any semblance of a vacation or even so much as a personal day was frowned upon and avoided whenever possible, no exceptions.

Except when convinced otherwise by his wife, little vixen that she was.

"Why is it that I let you get away with these sorts of things?" he asked as he sat on the couch, holding the remote in one hand and an armful of Amy in the other.

"Because you love me?" she replied, smiling coyly up at him from her spot on his lap, head tucked snugly into the crook of his neck and legs wrapped like a vine around his own.

As he flicked lazily through the channels, the physicist's lips gathered to the side in a feeble attempt to keep from smiling. "Well, besides that."

"Okay, then how about because we're both overworked and needed a day to ourselves for some…" she walked her fingers up his chest to toy with his collar suggestively. "Grown-up things?"

As a married man for nearly a decade and father of two, Sheldon knew precisely what that meant but decided to tease her by playing innocent. "Like doing our taxes? Paying our bills? I don't see why we can't do that with the girls present, do you?"

"Oh, believe me," Amy crooned as she leaned in to press a line of kisses up his throat. "You would not want our children to witness my…" she found that sweet spot just beneath his earlobe and suckled it gently as he shuddered in response. "Budgeting methods."

Sheldon broke away from her ministrations to gaze with hooded lids down at his beautiful wife, eyes roving over her face with unmasked want. He waited patiently until he detected Amy's breathing pattern grow shallow and erratic as she stared back at him before grinning in triumph and, with almost a growl, diving in for the kill.

The front lock clicked just as their lips were about to meet, and Sheldon barely had time to shove Amy off his lap before the door opened and two little girls stepped in, backpacks swinging behind them as they returned home from school.

"Um, uh, hey girls," Sheldon stuttered as he shielded himself behind Amy to hide his… well. "Aren't you home a little- ahem- a little early?

Amelia strode briskly inside without a second thought, but Josie remained in the doorway as she stared perplexed at both Amy and Sheldon, eyes taking in her father's flushed face and mother's awkward half-off position on the couch. "No…"

"Oh. Well, um, okay then." Sheldon cleared his throat loudly, tugging at his collar as he attempted to collect himself.

With a sigh both of disappointment and exasperation, Amy quickly straightened herself out and returned her attention to her daughter. "So, how was kindergarten today?

"Great!" Promptly forgetting her parents' odd behavior, Josie bounded fully into the room and plopped herself between the two. "When I finished my work before the other kids Mrs. Beckham let me go to the library to look through the science books and then Hiranya and I played blocks with Aidan and then Elissa brought in her three angel fish for show-and-tell and can I have a snack, Mommy?"

Amy blinked as she took a moment to process the whirlwind of information suddenly piled upon her. Most definitely a Cooper. "Uh sure, knock yourself out."

As Josie made her way to the kitchen, Amy turned around in her seat. "And how was your day, Ame-" But the elder girl had already disappeared.

Sheldon and Amy exchanged confused looks with each other. Though not nearly as talkative as her sister, Amelia was always eager to tell her parents about what she was learning in her fourth grade class, two years ahead of her other peers. She never withdrew like this, not with her family at least, which left the two scientists understandably concerned.

Sheldon rose from his seat to approach Josie as she munched happily on a granola bar, intent on answers. "Jo, has Amelia seemed a bit off to you today?"

Josie stopped chewing to ponder her father's question. "Well she was pretty quiet on the bus ride home. She didn't even want to play Junior Counterfactuals with me."

"Any idea why she's behaving this way?"

The little girl merely shook her head.

Sheldon looked back at Amy, who then stood up as well and started heading towards the hall. "Come on Sheldon, lets go see what's going on."

He was just about to follow when a certain five-year-old called out again. "Can you get me a cup first, Daddy? I want some juice."

"Of course." Sheldon went to the cupboard and reached up to grant his daughter's request when he suddenly pulled up short, frowning deeply.

"Josie?" he asked said as he pulled something from the cabinet. "What are your new reading glasses doing up here?"

That was enough to prompt Amy to turn tail and move back into the kitchen, and for Josie to freeze in place, granola halfway to her mouth.

"Josephine…" Amy began, warning etched into her tone. "Did you hide your glasses up there?"

The two parents could practically see the cogs whirring at record speed in their little girl's head as she tried to produce a valid excuse, as well as her look of defeat when coming up with none.

"They look nerdy," she said at last.

"But they're supposed to help you, and you only have to wear them some of the time anyway," Amy explained gently. "Besides, I wear glasses. Do you think I look nerdy?"

Josie's glanced around Amy's form to look to her father, who frantically shook his head behind her back. "No," she said.

Amy smiled warmly as she pressed a kiss to her daughter's cheek despite her squirming protests. "I love it when you lie for me."

Turning to take her husband by the hand, the couple started once again for the hall when Josie called out with hope in her voice. "Does that mean that-"

Neither looking back nor slowing their gait, Sheldon and Amy said in perfect unison: "You're still wearing them."

"Drat!"

Any chuckles brought about by the shenanigans of their younger daughter soon died off as soon as Sheldon performed his usual triple knock and opened the girls' bedroom door. Within they found Amelia curled in a ball on the bed, her back facing her parents. She looked so out of place just then, in a room full of fun shapes and bright colors when she was looking so sad and lifeless, and Sheldon and Amy glanced at each other once again before the latter tentatively stepped inside.

"Lia?" she asked quietly. "Is everything alright?"

Amelia turned over at her mother's voice, eyes glassy and nose reddened as she stared up into each of her parents' faces in turn, like she was weighing her options. After one eternally long moment, the little girl replied only with a barely perceptible shake of the head.

Both mother and father joined their daughter on the bed, and Amy took one tiny hand in her own. "What is it, sweetheart? You can tell us anything, right Sheldon?"

The physicist shifted his focus from Amy to Amelia, and though he was still unfamiliar with facial cues tried to give as encouraging a smile as he could. "Absolutely."

Reassured by her parents' kind words, Amelia sat herself up in the bed, staring intently at the hand joined with her mother's as she chose her words with care. "Ever since I skipped to the fourth grade and moved upstairs, things have been… different."

"Good different or bad different?"

"Neither, at first. Just different. I wasn't around my other friends from my old class, but I was also learning things more at my level, so I was happy." She took a deep, steadying breath. "Except, there's these fifth grade girls…"

At that point Amy didn't need any more information, past experience painfully filling in the missing details for her, but she knew Amelia needed to admit to this herself. Willing her voice to remain calm but anger bleeding through the edges despite herself, Amy said, "What did they do?"

That one simple question was like the break in the dam, and a sudden flood of words and emotions burst forth. "It started out with little things, snickers behind my back, tiny paper wads tossed at me, things I could handle. But today after school let out, I was going down the steps and I had almost reached the last one when I was pushed and I fell the rest of the way. I tore a hole in my pants and scraped my hand and they just laughed at me, and one… and one said…" Amelia shuddered, as if it physically hurt her to keep going. "She said that that was where I belonged. On the first floor."

Sheldon's initial instinct was to yell, throw something, call every authority figure in that blasted school until each and every one of those brats was expelled. But he was a man who was, first and foremost, a caretaker, so his first course of action was to rise and quickly round to the other side of the bed, sidling up beside his daughter to examine her injured palm.

"Does it hurt?" he asked.

"No," she answered, avoiding eye contact. "Not the hand, anyway."

She was trying so hard to be brave, to prove to her parents that she could deal with this, but she couldn't quite stop the sniffle that escaped as she muttered halfheartedly, "I'll be fine. You always go on about how intelligent I am, I can put up with stupid Charity Lavoie and her friends."

"What?!" came a voice from outside. Before anyone had a chance to respond, the door opened and Josie came charging through, any embarrassment of being caught eavesdropping giving way to her shock. "Charity can't be mean like that! Everybody likes her."

Amy sighed. "You'll learn this as you move up in school, but those two things aren't always mutually exclusive." She held out a hand, and Josie was quick to join in on the family meeting, allowing her mother to wrap a loving arm around her as the little girl leaned into the embrace.

"Well she's nice to me," Josie said, arms folded defiantly. "She sneaks me pieces of candy, gives me advice on fashion, and always calls me a cutie."

Amelia scoffed. "A far cry from the name she has for me."

Dreading the answer, Sheldon turned to his firstborn. "What name?"

The girl's lower lip began trembling dangerously. "She- all of them, really- they call- they call me… they call me a freak!" And with that she put her hands to her face and collapsed into tears.

Without a word Sheldon scooped his baby girl into his lap and hugged her tightly, lips on her head, reminding him of that day as an infant when she was sobbing over the quarreling between her new and terrified parents. He looked across to his other two girls, each bearing twin expressions of worry and uncertainty, and though Josie was usually seen as an inheritor of the Cooper bloodline, right then all Sheldon could see in her was Amy.

"It'll be okay, Lia, I promise," Sheldon murmured into her hair, closing his eyes. "We'll figure this out."

~0~0~0~0~0~

"How on earth are we going to figure this out?"

Amy sat quietly on the bed as her husband paced the expanse of their room, hands behind his head and haphazardly (uncharacteristically) threading his fingers through his hair.

"Sheldon, you need to calm down-"

"No, you need to get fired up!" he accused, whipping around to face her. "She's our daughter, Amy, she's hurting, and you have the audacity to suggest we do nothing for her?!"

"No," Amy said sharply, rising to her feet as her voice did the same. "I'm with you, I want nothing more than to march straight down to that school building and make those girls cry the same way that they made Lia, then rip apart limb by limb those wholly inadequate teachers for failing to so much as glance up from their schoolbooks and notice a suffering child. But it's not about what we want, it's about what Amelia needs, so don't you dare imply that I don't care for the well-being of my daughter!"

To his credit, Sheldon had the decency to look away in shame as he turned and sank slowly down into the bed. Amy soon joined him, and for a long minute the pair simply sat there, side by side, looking straight ahead as they pondered what to do.

"I'm sorry," Sheldon said at last, still faced forward as he reached down to lace his fingers with hers. Amy didn't reply apart from one small squeeze to their joined hands, letting him know that they were okay.

"You know how she is, Sheldon," Amy said quietly as she finally turned to look at him. "She's shy, she's quiet, she doesn't like to make waves or upset people. Others are going to take advantage of that. We can't always be solving her problems for her; she needs to learn how to stand up for herself."

"But what if she doesn't?" her husband asked, clearly distressed. "Are we supposed to just sit back and watch her come home every day in tears?"

For a long moment Amy said nothing, deep in thought. "Proposal: we give her two more days to solve this herself. If we reach the end of that time frame and nothing changes, we both go in and meet with her teacher, maybe even the principal if we have to, and handle it ourselves."

Sheldon stared into the distance as he considered her offer, and it wasn't until he inwardly examined every single possibility before he at last nodded his head. "Agreed."

Again the two went quiet. They had arrived at a compromise, yes, but neither felt as though the conversation was over just yet, as though something else was hanging like a dark cloud above their heads that needed to be addressed.

It was Amy who abruptly broke the silence. "Do you think the girls are ashamed of their intelligence?"

Sheldon snapped back to attention as he swiveled his head to stare at his wife like she had gone insane (she had never been tested, after all). "Why in the devil's name would you think that?"

Amy didn't answer right away, eyes once again turning to the front. "When I started sixth grade, I was determined that I was going to shed the coat of the nerdy, outcast Amy from grade school and make a new image for myself. I tried to copy all the popular girls' outfits by sewing my own, I stopped raising my hand for every question, I snuck my mother's makeup into school and applied it in the bathroom…" she threw a meaningful glance Sheldon's way. "I even hid my glasses so I wouldn't have to wear them."

Realization dawned. "Do you think that's why Jo didn't want to skip up to first grade?"

"I wouldn't doubt it." Amy sighed heavily. "Anyways, my little 'cool girl' phase didn't work out so well. I looked like a clown in a patchwork quilt who constantly smacked into walls and developed a nervous twitch when she knew the right answers but didn't give them. There's a reason you've never seen my sixth grade yearbook photo." She chuckled without humor. "I guess I just can't help but be myself."

"And thank my mother's nonexistent God for that," Sheldon muttered as his hand unconsciously gripped hers a bit tighter, unaware of how pleased he made his wife with those words.

"I know we've both had our fair share of bullying as kids, you primarily through physical harassment and myself through social isolation, and I wouldn't wish that upon anyone. But," she drew in several sharp, ragged breaths as she began to tear up against her will. "I'd rather my children be ridiculed and ousted for life than be embarrassed of who they are."

Sheldon stood and, after tugging Amy up as well, pulled her into a fierce embrace; head to head, chest to chest and heart to heart. "They won't. I promise you. Maybe it won't be today, but when the time comes, when it really and truly matters, Amelia and Josie will take such pride in their own brilliance it would take a jousting lance to get them off their high horses."

"How can you be so sure?" Amy asked into his neck.

"Because," she felt a smile quirk against her hair. "They're ours."

~0~0~0~0~0~

The following day, Amelia and Sam sat huddled on the front steps of the school, the wind blowing at such astronomic rates they might as well have been a couple of twigs stuck in a pile of dirt. This did little to bother the young Cooper, however, as she was preoccupied with calming the pounding of her heart in her ears.

She'd been like this all day, going about her business in fear that the fifth grade posse of first-rate torturers were lurking just around the corner, poised and ready to pounce. Amelia had even considered borrowing Sam's inhaler a few times, and though she had somehow managed to live to the end of the schoolday, she knew she wouldn't breathe easy again until she was in her bus and well on her way home.

"Well, if it isn't little Miss Know-It-All."

So close.

Amelia took an iota of a second to brace herself before turning to face her adversary, none other than- you guessed it- Charity Lavoie, flanked by four almost as beautiful but just as snooty girls, two on either side. Everyone else on the scene had blotchy red cheeks and hair whipping in their faces from the wind, yet Charity looked as though she had just walked off a Hollywood movie set and straight into Amelia's perfect idea of a nightmare.

"So, how's our favorite stuck-up squirt today?" Charity said with a smirk. A chorus of screeching giggles followed, right on cue.

When her parents had sat her down to tell her their planned course of action in regards to her situation, they had offered all sorts of useful advice and encouragements. She imagined they would be even more useful if she could remember any.

The five moved as one unit as they advanced upon their prey. "Still think you're too smart for us, too above putting those brains of yours to good use?" Charity challenged, stooping to Amelia's level in the most condescending way imaginable. "Your options are simple, honey. Help me and my girls with our homework and we'll be your best friends. If not… well, it doesn't take a genius to see how these past few weeks have been for you."

Ah, yes. The confrontation that had started it all. Few knew that the blonde beauty had started out just as sweet to Amelia as she was to everyone else, possibly even more so. Like with Josie, she had started off with little sideway hugs in the halls and compliments on her vast intelligence, and her friends, of course, followed suit. Then the day came when Charity approached her to ask a "very special favor" of her, but thanks to the knowledge that the fifth-grader was using the term "help" in the loosest sense of the word, and to the code of honor her mom and dad had raised her on, she simply had to refuse.

Surprisingly, Charity had initially responded rather graciously, flashing the very best of her candy-coated smiles. "Oh I understand, sweetheart. That's just fine." And with a flip of her perfect pin-straight hair, she sashayed off.

The very next day, the snickers started.

The girls circled the young girl like a pack of bloodthirsty vultures. "Check out this sweater," said one of Charity's accomplices, a ditzy brunette named Brielle, as she tugged at Amelia's well-worn cardigan. "Where'd you get it from, 1993?"

Considering that it was one of her mother's old sweaters from her own childhood, the snide comment probably wasn't far from the truth. But they didn't need to know that.

Drawing herself up to her full four-foot height, Amelia put on the bravest face she could muster as she once again recalled the agreement between herself and her parents. She had to prove to them, to herself, to everyone in the world that she could do this. If only she could stop feeling like she was about to be sick to her stomach.

"I-I- well, I-"

"Aww," another girl, Savannah, cooed with a sharp pinch to the cheek. "Look at the freak trying to communicate with us."

"Hey!" yelled Sam as he stood himself between Amelia and the little posse. "I'll have you know that in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, Harry is called a freak by his aunt because of his magical powers. But I mean, who wouldn't want to be able to perform actual magic? If being a freak is what it takes to do that, I'll be first in line at Platform Nine-and-Three-Quarters!"

But his words only fell on deaf ears and glazed eyes as the girls collectively stared at the short, bespectacled, crooked-toothed of a second-grader before ignoring him completely and returning to their main target.

"Like I was saying, sweetheart, the choice is all yours," Charity continued in that sickeningly sweet voice that thinly veiled the malice underneath. "But if I were you, I'd save myself the trouble and just suck it up and do as I'm told. It's all you and your smarts are going to be good for, anyways."

"Don't you even think of talking to her that way!"

The group as a whole turned on the spot to gaze up at the one and only Josephine Cooper, standing tall on the top step with arms crossed and looking every bit the superhero that she was. "Of course, that would imply that you have the ability to think in the first place."

For the first time since they met, Amelia witnessed Charity Lavoie falter. "Oh hey, cutie-"

"Don't you 'cutie' me!" Josie cried as she marched straight up into the older girl's face. "You know, I looked up to you, and I had hoped that one day I could be as cool as you. Now I'm praying that I grow up to be anything but like you."

"I've been doing you a favor!" Charity nearly shrieked. "You're normal, you've got friends. I've been helping you so you won't end up like your nerdy misfit of a sister here."

"Yeah, well I don't need your help. 'Cause you know what…" she reached into her pocket and pulled out her glasses before faithfully perching them on the bridge of her nose. "I'm a nerd, too, and proud of it."

Confidence rising, Amelia approached Charity from behind and wrenched her around. "And another thing," she said with a passion she had no idea she possessed until this moment. "No matter what names you call me, no matter what things you laugh about me behind my back, it's not gonna bother me anymore. Because until you recognize the allure of an atom, or the periodic table, or the planetary system, or the human body… you'll never know the beauty of science. And I feel sorry for you."

The bus arrived then, and Amelia spun on her heels and left Charity and her friends shivering in the autumn wind, Josie prancing victoriously behind as they boarded the schoolbus, but Sam lagged behind. He had one more thing he wanted to say.

"We may be freaks, but it's scientists like us who perform the real life magic." Looking upon Charity's blank face, Sam sighed at her ignorance. "Go to the library and pick up the Harry Potter books. You'll be glad you did." And with that the boy turned tail and followed his friends.

Amelia's grin as they drove off was small, yet as resplendent as a soldier returning from battle with the spoils of war.