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Collide, or, The Cooper-Ballard Convergence	By : FemmeBono Category: 1 through F > The Big Bang Theory Views: 4469 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Big Bang Theory, nor the characters from it. I do not make any money from the writing of this story.

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Cht 5

I find I’m scared to know

I’m always on your mind

Late that afternoon Whitney came into the lobby and found Leonard checking the mail with a bag of take-out food on the table beside him.
“Hey there,” she greeted, slipping off her aviator sunglasses and hanging them from the open collar of her polo shirt. “This is convenient. I’ve been wanting to talk to you about Sheldon.”
“Oh boy,” said Leonard, tucking the mail in the bag and taking it to the stairs. “What’s he done now?”
“Oh nothing,” she said quickly. “It’s just, I actually kicked back and read through that neighbor agreement deal over lunch today, and I’ve got to say it raises some questions about that loopy little guy.”
Leonard rolled his eyes as he started to trudge up the steps. “You know you really don’t have to sign that.”
“Oh I know,” Whitney said, trailing after him. “At first I just wanted to have some fun with him and see how long I could drag it out, but now I don’t really want to do that to him.”
“Oh god no!” Leonard scoffed. “He’d probably implode. You can just tell him no and let him sulk for a while. He’ll probably try to blow you up with his mind, but since that won’t work he’ll give up and start ignoring your existence.”
“But I am going to sign it,” Whitney cut in. “Most of it is pretty straightforward and understandable. No crazy smells or sounds emanating from my apartment so that it affects him in his…that’s actually just being neighborly anyway. I just wondered why I would need to give him a ride if no one else can. Does he not have a car?”
Leonard stopped on the second floor landing and turned to look at Whitney.
“Sheldon doesn’t even have a license, and you don’t want him in your car. It’s like having a driver’s exam every time you get in. You have to make sure everyone’s buckled up, make sure your mirrors are adjusted, the air can’t be too cool or too hot, it can’t be blowing directly on him, you can’t play the radio. There are a million Sheldon-y things that will drive you crazy, never mind that he criticizes every turn and monitors how fast you’re going worse than my aunt Mildred.”
“Yeah, I have noticed he’s a tad neurotic, but all that control freak stuff is just so he can feel safe for whatever reason. The appropriate question is: why doesn’t he feel safe?”
Leonard’s brows furrowed. He actually never wondered why Sheldon was the way he was; he just always focused on Sheldon being coo-coo for Cocoa Puffs and bucked his crazy system whenever he could.
“Besides,” Whitney continued. “He’s light years beyond some of the people I’ve deal with. You think Sheldon’s bad, try an OCD drill sergeant. We labeled everything, color-coded it, and cleaned everything with bleach before we turned it back in at the end of the cycle.”
“That actually sounds quite a lot like Sheldon,” Leonard mused, trying to picture Sheldon in a drill sergeant’s hat. It was surprisingly easy to do. Leonard trudged off toward the stairs again and continued to their floor.
“Yeah, so whatever his issues are I’ve seen way worse. He’s just a little rusty with the social skills. At least I know if I tilt my mirror wrong I won’t get smoked for it. I doubt he’d ever have me on the ground doing push-ups and grass drills, motivators, and god knows what all else for it. He’s just quirky, that’s all. And if he can’t drive himself I don’t mind taking him somewhere or doing something for him.”
“Ha! Just whatever you do, don’t expect Sheldon to go out of his way for you in return. He doesn’t think like that.” Whitney frowned at Leonard’s back. Sheldon must not have mentioned last night’s events to his roommate, she mused. Secretly, she was thankful he hadn’t, but the way Sheldon had taken care of her went above and beyond anything he required in his agreement. Sure, the passages pertaining to alien invasions weren’t likely to happen…ever…so most of what he required that did exist in the realm of possibility was perfectly reasonable.
“Oh and by the way, when we get in here just make sure you don’t sit in Sheldon’s spot,” Leonard warned, cutting into her thoughts. “There’s a whole long-winded explanation as to why it’s his, but suffice to say that’s the center of his little Sheldon-sized cosmos. He’s actually called it his point 0,0,0,0 in time and space.”
“Like the origin point on a Cartesian plane?” Whitney smiled, rolled her eyes and shook her head. What a character…
“Exactly!” said Leonard, a grudgingly affectionate smile on his face as he unlocked the door. When they entered, Penny and Raj were already seated on the couch and Sheldon was typing away at his desk. He turned when they came in and he smiled at Whitney.
“Oh Whitney, glad you could make it. I took the liberty of printing out some notes and background on Halo if you would like to create a character and play with us. You could play on Raj’s and my team so I could show you the ropes, as it were.”
“Um, that’s okay I have a character actually. I used to play downrange sometimes with the guys. Or on staff duty with whoever my duty runner was for the night. It could get pretty boring sometimes having to stay awake all night.”
“Whomever,” Sheldon corrected.
“Yeah that,” said Whitney, unperturbed. She smiled at Penny though, as the girl rolled her eyes behind Sheldon’s back.
As they settled in to eat their take-out Thai, Sheldon rolled his desk chair over for Whitney to sit in. Whitney saw the way Penny’s eyebrows winged up at this, but said nothing.
“Penny you’re in my spot,” Sheldon said simply. With a roll of her eyes, Penny slid out of the right cushion and into the middle.
“Must be nice having your center be something that simple,” Whitney supplied, garnering looks from everyone in the room as they tucked in to their respective dishes.
“Oh it is,” Sheldon replied with a sincere smile. Whitney made a note to try to make him smile more often. “No matter how far away I get, or whatever happens, I always know it’s here waiting for me. Perfectly molded to me at the perfect point in the room, at the perfect temperature.”
“I get that. It’s like your anchor,” Whitney countered as she smiled back. “I wish I had that. All the moving and deploying, redeploying, traveling for training… I’ve always felt uprooted and sort of cast to the winds. I have no point of origin.”
Whitney looked around in the awkward silence that followed. Sheldon was amiably chewing and nodding, but everyone else was looking back at her speculatively. Woo good job, way to go Whit, she thought.
“So um…where is everyone else?” she asked, searching for a new topic.
“Oh, ah, Howard and Bernie are having brisket with his mother tonight,” Leonard supplied. “The elder Mrs. Wolowitz had her varicose veins lasered and she offered to make dinner in exchange for a ride. Plus she hasn’t quite cut Howard’s umbilical cord yet.”
This earned a snort from Raj’s corner, where he was quietly eating while waiting for the wine he had brought to take effect so he could talk with females present.

No one mentioned Amy, Whitney noticed, and she wondered why.
“So Whitney,” Penny piped up, “Leonard says you have a contract job here in Pasadena. What do you do there?”
“Oh, I’m an all source analyst,” she replied. “It’s not exactly what I did in the Army, but it’s close enough that I can cross over into that field.”
“What’s an all source analyst do?” Leonard put in.
“Basically we take all the reporting from different intel sources and look for patterns,” she answered. “We just try to connect all the dots and make sure that information gets filtered up to the proper channels.”
“So you’re actually in intelligence,” smirked Penny, “go figure you wound up here.”
“Ha, ha, yeah!” Whitney said amused at the irony. “We were like the Geek Squad of the Army. Now I’m just doing the same sort of thing on the civilian side of the house. Which, incidentally, now that I think of it…why exactly were you on the watchlist there, Dr. Cooper?”
Sheldon glanced abruptly in her direction and ducked his face down toward his plate again, but not before Whitney detected a twitch.
“No reason. Why do you ask?”
“Sheldon, I have questioned a lot of liars in my time,” said Whitney catching his eye and raising a brow. “You have more tells than a first-time poker player with a royal flush. And my system shows me a daily update of people on the list in the area. You just dropped off the list a couple weeks ago. So spill. What did you do?”
“Ah, he actually hacked into a government supercomputer and started scouting around Craigslist for some uranium,” Leonard supplied happily, “and Homeland Security called his mother.”
“You WHAT??!” Whitney shrieked.
“Oh it wasn’t as dire as all that,” Sheldon said testily. “I simply wanted a radioactive tracer for a card trick. There was no need to call my mother.”
“A card trick? Is that geek speak for something?”
“No,” said Penny as she chewed on her dumpling. “Howard stumped him with a magic trick and he was trying to figure out how Howard knew which card people picked.”
Sheldon, looking extremely disgruntled with the direction of the conversation, piped up, “so enough about me. Whitney, you said you don’t do exactly the same thing as you did in the Army, so what did you do before?”
Whitney smiled evilly, “I was an interrogator. Still intel, but a different branch of it.”
“Wow,” Penny marveled. “You must have had to deploy quite a bit for that, huh?”
“Yeah, it’s sort of impossible to do that kind of job from here. As an analyst though, I can track reports from all corners of the world.”
“I’m not on your watchlist am I,” Raj suddenly spoke up.
“Well, that came out of nowhere,” said Whitney. “Did your wine finally kick in or something? And no, for the record you’re not. Should you be, and is there something I don’t know?” she asked, leveling her gaze at him with a smile.
“No,” he said nervously, “it’s just that I’m brown and I talk funny.”
“Ha!” Whitney crowed. “That doesn’t make a difference. Sheldon’s white and he was on it for crying out loud. Besides, you don’t look, sound or smell like an insurgent. Trust me.”
“Smell?” said Penny wrinkling her nose. “Ugh, don’t tell me.”
“Believe me, you don’t want to know.”
“So you said you played Halo some while you were overseas,” Leonard said as he started collecting empty containers and clearing the coffee table. Sheldon took off to the bathroom, and Raj kicked back on the couch.
“Have you played Halo 4?”
“I actually have a little bit when we got back here. We just got back in June and I started ACAPing almost immediately. Then I was on terminal leave for a couple of months, interviewing and getting everything ready to move out here, so on my down time I’d play.”
“ACAPing?”
“Basically outprocessing from the Army.”
With that, Whitney rose and returned Sheldon’s chair to his desk while Penny and Leonard finished clearing the food away. She then slid into the floor and grabbed a game controller from the XBOX and assumed her game playing position, stretched out on her back with her ankles crossed. Raj tossed her a pillow from the couch. As she stuck it under her head and thanked him, Sheldon came traipsing back down the hall from washing his hands and hesitated in the doorway. He watched as Whitney tossed Raj a game controller and settled on her pillow.
Then Penny walked by and glanced at Sheldon, standing still as he watched from the shadow of the hall. Without a word, he continued into the living room and settled into his spot again. Penny made it a point from that time on to watch Sheldon a little more closely around their new friend. Her little whackadoodle might actually have a ‘deal’ after all…

Lyrics from Howie Day's "Collide"
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Collide, or, The Cooper-Ballard Convergence