Work Text:
The Curative Irritant Hypothesis
The young woman spoke with determined perkiness. Her bright blonde hair and jewel-toned clothes clashed somehow with the stark white walls, but she had the kind of beauty that stood up even beneath fluorescent lighting.
She spoke into the silence that most found oppressive, words tripping off her tongue in an artless flow; her cheerfulness a shield against despair.
She was the most regular visitor since the patient had been transferred, trailing noise and colour and light and laughter, chivvying the other members of her group; though they did not come as often as she.
As the weeks went by the visitors slowly tapered off; not so many, not so frequent. (Though every two weeks like clockwork the blunt Texan woman would descend and both charm and terrify the staff as she bent them to her will.) The three small men still came, nearly always in a group, hovering awkwardly around the room, and rarely speaking. The sweet-faced Indian nearly always left early, with tears in his eyes. The other blonde woman still came occasionally, too, but the brunette had grown steadily paler with each week that passed, eyes puffy and red-rimmed, then she stopped coming altogether.
But the sunny-haired blonde came every day.
Chattering about cheesecakes and auditions, Stan Lee and Doctor Who, Fig Newtons and Massachusetts, prank wars and chess games.
She read aloud from Scientific American, making scoffing noises, particularly scathing as she referred to an article published by a Dr. Kripke (oddly she seemed to develop a speech impediment when reading that one).
Every three weeks she would bring clippers with her, and a head-shot that appeared to date from the 1940s, which she would carefully refer to as she trimmed the patient's hair.
One time she even brought in spaghetti, enough for two, holding it under his nose with a hopeful smile. She'd offered half to one of the nurses, and they'd sat together eating the surprisingly tasty food. The nurse remarked on the tastiness of the cut-up hot dogs. She was rewarded with a brilliant smile and agreement that it was a real 'Eye-talian treat'.
She was so bubbly and kind, the staff didn't even mind that she insisted his pyjamas be changed every day and brought in carefully ironed garments for this purpose.
But mostly she would talk to him.
She would pause every so often as she spoke, looking at him hopefully, as though to see how he was responding. Occasionally she would reach out a hand, then check herself and pull it back again. One orderly thought he heard her muttering about "strikes".
But there was something different about today. Something underlying her words. Not quite a diminishment of hope, but a weariness, a sadness that she couldn't quite disguise. A vagueness that suggested a loss of direction.
"I bought you a new train set," she said quietly. "Then I went to the Golden Dragon and roughed the guy up a little until he swore to only use tangerines in the chicken from now on. And I bulk bought the good mustard and stored it in my apartment in case you wanted the chicken with broccoli. We'll have a feast when you wake up. Just the way you like it. So you need to wake up now, Sheldon, okay? It's been long enough." The hand crept out, hovered; her mouth quivered. Then as if she couldn't help it any longer, she grabbed hold of him, lacing her fingers with his, and spoke through a voice threaded with tears: "Come on, Moonpie… Wake up. Please? It just… doesn't make sense without you."
A faint crease appeared between his brows. His exhalation sounded stronger than usual, close to a huff, lips moving as he breathed.
She leapt to her feet. "Did you hear that? Did you hear that! He spoke!"
She rushed out the room and grabbed at a passing doctor.
"He spoke! I think he's waking up! Come see, come see!"
They checked his vitals, his pupils, his cardiograph printout. There had been a spike a few minutes back, but now the patient appeared unchanged.
"Miss…"
She didn't want to hear it. "He spoke! He did! I heard him."
"Sometimes we hear what we want to hear─"
She cut across him angrily. "He did, he did! He said Meemaw! It's 'cos I called him Moonpie! Only Meemaw calls him that."
The doctor shook his head sadly at this loss of coherency. Hardly surprising considering how hard she'd been pushing herself. "Miss, I think you need to go home and get some sleep…"
She stared at him as if he was being remarkably stupid, but then her eyes suddenly widened; she grabbed his arm and squeezed – painfully – hard. For such a slim girl, she had quite a grip.
"You're right – you're right! I need to go home and plan. I've been doing this all wrong! I should've known! Normal never works with Dr. Whack-a-Doodle." Beaming a smile so dazzling he found himself instantly forgiving the entire exchange, she rushed from the room.
The nurses gossiped about this departure from the norm, wondering sadly if she had finally cracked under the strain. One went so far as to say perhaps she wouldn't come back, but was shouted down by the others.
They were right. She came back the next day.
But she came back different.
The staff of St. Joseph's watched bemused as the formerly sweet, beautiful blonde who had near broken their hearts with her constant vigil morphed before their eyes into bat-crap crazy.
She returned to the hospital, struggling under a load of brightly-coloured laundry, which she dumped on the patient's floor.
She turned to look at him, for all the world as if she expected him to say something. When he remained unchanged, she sat down on the ground and pulled a shirt towards her, messily folding it in two lengthways, and then again sideways.
"I'm folding your clothes without your folding thingy, Sheldon!" she sing-songed. "And look – I'm matching blue socks with green." For a second she thought his breathing got a little heavier… she looked up hopefully. But his eyes remained stubbornly closed.
The next day she bustled into the room, flourishing a piece of paper.
"You got an email!" She cleared her throat and began to read. "'Hey, Dr. Dumb-Ass! So you went ahead and finally proved your lack of smarts once and for all. Getting hit by a truck and mushing your brains up? Not too bright. Guess this proves what we've known all along: I'm the better scientist. Which also proves loop quantum gravity is the only viable future for physics, and string theory is, to quote your quaint Texas ways, pure hogwash."
She stopped, her breath catching. Sheldon's hands had curled in on themselves!
She excitedly called out to the doctors again; they responded with patient explanations of nerve endings firing and "inadvertent movement", but she shook her head stubbornly: "That wasn't nerve endings: that was hands wanting to throttle." And she skipped down the corridor, murmuring something about sending flowers to "Leslie".
The next day things got even weirder.
"Smell that?" she chirped as she wafted what appeared to be a leather couch cushion under his nose. "Yep. That's right. I've taken it from your apartment. I'm going to put it in my lounge. It's going to be my spot." Sheldon's nostrils seemed to flare for a moment with… outrage?
She frogmarched a passing orderly into the room and repeated the couch cushion move. When he agreed the patient's nostrils were flaring, she threw her arms round his neck and kissed his cheek. He left the room in a daze, accidentally walking into the doorframe.
Penny watched him go, lips pursed with thought.
The next day she waited while the nurse changed Sheldon's pyjamas, then sat down next to him, pulling a jar of vapour rub from her purse.
Once she was sure she was alone, she started speaking with poisonous sweetness:
"How're you enjoying your pyjamas, Sheldon? Nice and cosy? Just the way you like 'em? Or do they feel a little… off? Yeah, that's right, Dr. Cooper. There's a disturbance in the force." She smirked. "I thought it would be fun if we mixed things up a little: Tuesday's pyjamas on a Monday! Isn't that neat?" Her voice firmed. "Let's get serious, Shelly: if you don't open your eyes, I'm going to unbutton your shirt and rub this sticky stuff into your chest." She removed the jar's lid, and held it under his nose. "I'm going to touch you even though you haven't asked me to; I'm going to use vapour rub on you even though you're not sick; and─" Her eyes lit. "And! I'm going to rub it in clockwise so your chest hair mats!"
She went so far as to start unbuttoning his shirt, but then stopped and sighed. He looked so childlike in his sleep. Innocent and trusting.
He was innocent. She couldn't do it.
She rebuttoned his shirt, then pulled her chair forward so she was close to his face, speaking softly:
"Okay, Dr. Whack-a-Doodle – you get a free pass for today. But expect business as usual tomorrow. My Barbie is not done with your Ken!" She tried to sharpen her tone but her eyes softened as she gazed at his face: the cheeks with a little more colour in them, the lips that were surprisingly full when not drawn tight with annoyance, the long, long lashes…
Of its own accord, her hand reached out and smoothed back his ever-so-slightly overgrown hair. She'd stopped cutting it as part of messing with his routine.
Quietly, tenderly, she began to sing:
"Soft kitty, warm kitty, little ball of fur. Happy kitty, sleepy kitty, purr, purr, purr."
His hand twitched on the covers. Penny blinked. Was he frowning?
She started again from the beginning:
"Soft kitty, warm kitty, little ball of fur…"
Her breath caught. Both hands had twitched that time! Barely allowing herself to hope, she breathily continued:
"Happy kitty, sleepy kitty, purr, purr, purr."
This time there was no mistaking it: his brows were sharply drawn together; a familiar Sheldonian look of disapproval at a world not obeying his rules.
Heart beginning to pound, she began again, but then stopped short, words catching in her throat, when another voice started speaking – slurred, lacking its usual precision, but recognisable, familiar and oh-so dear:
"Soft kitty is for when you're sick; I'm not sick."
Choking back a cry of delight, Penny smiled through the tears suddenly coursing down her face.
"Being in a coma following a car accident is a kind of sick."
There was a pause, then his lids opened; bright blue eyes that made her heart leap. She could admit now the fear she'd had that she would never see them open again.
He frowned at her, but it seemed more bemused than annoyed. "Penny, you're stroking my hair."
"Yes," she agreed. "Do you want me to stop?" She thought she might die if he told her to stop. Something in her needed this contact, this physical reassurance that he was once again with her.
His frown deepened in consideration. "Stimulating touch receptors under the skin can lower blood pressure and cortisol levels thereby reducing stress. If, as you say, I was in a vehicular collision, it may expedite my convalescence." His eyes fluttered closed for a moment, his brow cleared, and he muttered, "And it feels nice."
Penny closed her eyes in blessed relief at the undeniable Sheldon-ness of his statement; he was awake, and her greatest secret fear had not come to pass: he was still Sheldon. That beautiful mind was still intact.
Something coiled tight inside gave way.
Hardly knowing what she did, she climbed onto the bed and lay alongside him; hooking her arms round his neck, she buried her face at his throat, shoulders shaking as she finally gave way to her emotions.
"Penny!" he yipped in alarm. "You are moistening my neck with mucus!" She cried all the harder. After another minute, a hand came up and awkwardly patted her. "There, there. Sheldon's here?" He said it tentatively, like it was a question.
But when she pulled back to look at him, he saw she was beaming through her tears. She sniffed a few times, then wiped at her eyes with the sleeves of her sweatshirt, ignoring his horrified expression.
She put her arms back round his neck and pulled him into a hug. "Yes, he is. Don't ever go away, again, okay?" Then meeting his eyes once more, the smile gave way to a decidedly steely demeanour, and her arms tightened: "If you do, I'll tear the top left corner of every one of your mint comic books. That was the next step in my plan if you didn't wake up," she added.
Sheldon's eyes bulged in outrage, he opened his mouth to expostulate but faltered: there was a blazing look in her eyes that told him she was serious… and told him something else. New data he wasn't sure how to read, that required time to analyse.
His eidetic memory was already sorting and assimilating, formulating and rejecting hypotheses as splintered events, words and actions from the last three months began to coalesce; it juxtaposed them with earlier memories, patterns and premises. They added up to a new paradigm; they pointed the way to a life-altering discovery, but he wasn't quite sure what it was yet. So, he just nodded and acquiesced to her highly illogical request.
Silence ticked by, sky-blue eyes staring into jade-green, unable to look away.
"Penny?" he spoke softly, after a minute.
"Yeah, sweetie?"
"You're on my bed; no one can be on my bed."
She took her arms from his neck, but remained where she was; smiling again, and still with that blazing, troubling look in her eyes that seemed to be causing a cardiac arrhythmia.
"When have I ever followed the rules, Moonpie?"
Two years later, Raj recounted the tale and charged everyone to raise their glasses to the happy couple, reflecting that it had been a fitting step in a truly unique love story.
After all, only Penny could have annoyed Sheldon back to life.