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Chapter Text

That night is the beginning of the end.

*

Penny doesn't realize it, because Penny is either (a) in a great deal of pain or (b) drugged for the rest of the night--weekend--whatever. Stupid shower and stupid Sheldon and stupid lack of adhesive ducks (trust Sheldon to get hung up on all the little details, adjusting his mirrors and nonexistent ducks and her tattoo). She's loopy on painkillers, okay, and in that state it makes perfect sense for her to drape herself over Sheldon and demand he sing her "Soft Kitty" one more time.

"Penny. I'm trying to watch Firefly."

"Okay, but no," she says. "No, really, Sheldon, listen to this. Haven't you seen that show a frillion times already?"

"A 'frillion,'" Sheldon tells her, "is not a number."

"Yes, it is. It's a really, really, really, really big number." She giggle-snorts--delayed reaction, Sheldon said "frillion"--and claps her good hand against his cheek. "Hey, haven't you seen this show before?"

He catches her hand with his own and curls the fingers down, tucks it back against her side. "This is worse than the time my sister asked me to babysit her cat," he mutters, mostly to himself. Does Sheldon talk to himself when no one's around? He kinda seems like the type, you know, all brainy and not needing anyone and babbling away in some underground lair.

"Hey," she says, "do you have a lair?"

"A...pardon me, do I look like a supervillain?" Now he's just ticked because she made him pause the episode. Penny is wise in the ways of his exasperation. She is also wise enough to know that's it's probably not the best idea to antagonize him right now (not when he drove. For her!), but the ducks must have broken the filter between her brain and her mouth at the same time they broke her shoulder.

"Yes," she says. "Or no. I don't know. Maybe?" Her brow knits in concentration; she doesn't notice how Sheldon's eyes slide over her face, how they stutter at her lips. "Say 'inconceivable.'"

"Inconceivable," he repeats, dutifully.

"No no no no, Sheldon." Completely without her permission, her hand creeps up to his face again; her palms slots against the crook between his shoulder and his neck--that is a crazy appealing arrangement of muscle on men, God clearly knew what he was about--and her fingers brush the soft hair at the base of his skull. "No no no, you can't say it like that."

"How am I to say it, then?"

"Like this." No, wait, this requires the appropriate stance. She climbs to her knees, which seems to involve lots of sliding her body against Sheldon's and poking him accidentally in sensitive places, but after half a minute of squirming she pushes herself upright. "Inconceivable!" she cries, and flings her arms outward. One of her arms. She tries with the other, but there's a sharp lick of pain and a sling in the way.

"Mmhm, I see," Sheldon says, in what is clearly a humoring the crazy person voice. "Please sit down flat on your buttocks."

She giggles again. "Or what?"

"Or..." He frowns. "You might re-injure yourself. Do you really want to force me to drive again?"

"You said 'buttocks.'" Which is where her tattoo is. Sheldon's seen her tattoo, which seems terribly, almost overwhelmingly important for reasons she doesn't remember. Nevertheless, she slides down obediently and plasters herself against his side. For a guy who's always complaining about the cold, Sheldon puts off heat like a furnace. It's like he's carrying a little bit of Texas inside him, throwing out warmth and barbecue and--does Sheldon barbecue?

"Yes, I can cook any kind of meat that roams the continental United States on four legs. Will you be quiet now?"

She mimes pulling a zipper across her mouth, but her face cracks halfway through the gesture. When she was little, she and David thought "zip your lips" meant cinching a Ziploc shut over your face, which makes absolutely no sense when she thinks about it. Unless the Ziploc goes over your entire head--there'd have to be a hole for your neck--

"Do you even realize you're talking aloud?"

"Say what?" Penny works her shoulders back and forth and settles into her cushion. "Sheldon, can't you stop talking? I'm trying to watch TV."

"I...you...you are very drugged." Whatever. He hits play on the remote, and after a few minutes a thought occurs to Penny.

"Hey," she says, "haven't we seen this before?"

"Yes."

"Oh. Okay." And she watches in silence for all of point-five seconds before she says, "Hey, Sheldon? How did your father die?"

His frame locks up; she can feel the muscles in his arm stiffen, feel as he draws as far away from her as he can--which isn't far, since she's propped against his right and the arm of the couch is to his immediate left. "It's just," she rambles on, "you never really talk a whole lot about your dad. I hate mine. Sometimes, you know, I don't mean it like that, it's not a thing or anything. We talk. I tell him I love him. Should I not have asked that? I shouldn't have asked that, now I'm prying. Leonard always say I pry too much."

Sheldon clears his throat. "Are you finished?"

She twists around to peer at him through the mop of her hair. "Finished with what?"

"With that distasteful outpouring of emotion."

"Say what?" His sleeves are rolled up past his elbows today, which is all kinds of distracting.

"Am I to assume that David is your brother?"

"Wow, jumping topics a little fast, aren't we?" Just because she can, she prods him in the nose. "Don't give me whiplash, son."

"Don't poke me," he retorts, and bats her hand away. She stays turned around, eyes glued to his face, but behind her the DVD starts again.

*

That night is the beginning of the end, and she doesn't even know it. Dawn brings a death-toll for the middle, when she wakes up with Sheldon stretched out beside her. He's on top of the blankets, edged nearly off the bed entirely, and she's pressed from head to toe against his side. Her shoulder hurts like she roped and branded a whole head of cattle the day before.

Drugs are in order.

(But Sheldon is in her bed.)

*

"You peeeeeeked!" she drags out, and then laughs again. Sheldon twitches, otherwise doesn't react, but his mouth has that pinched look that reminds her of her great-grandpa scaring kids off his lawn. He usually did it with a rifle, but Sheldon can hurt just as quick with his words. Just as quick and just as deep.

Why the hell she keeps baiting him, she does not know. Has she mentioned that she's not in her right mind?

"You peeked! You said the hero--hey," she says, "who were those guys you mentioned yesterday?"

"...'Guys?'"

"Yeah, you know." Satisfaction blooms in her chest, because she's won back his attention. "Medusa. And the other guys."

"Perseus?"

"Yeah. And the other guys."

"Orpheus and Eurydice?"

"Yeah. Tell me about them."

"Contrary to popular belief, I don't exist solely to provide you with instruction on everything you don't understand." Line 'em up and knock 'em down, gentlemen, is there a button of his she cannot push?

What she says is, "Huh?"

He turns to her and enunciates very, very slowly. "Look. It. Up."

"Oh. Okay." She waits just a beat--this time purposefully, not because of the weird lurch in her brain when she tries to look at a clock--and asks, "Can I borrow your computer?"

"No."

Here's what she likes about pissing Sheldon off--again, not normally something she does on purpose, but she can be excused. What she likes is the way the tendons on his neck stand out (she'd like to bite down right there) and the way his hands fist, the way he starts to drawl like a good southern boy and the way he forgets his distance. She likes the last best of all. So she says: "Can I borrow Leonard's computer?"

(It occurs to her that she'd never thought to call Leonard last night--)

The TV screen looks like it's having a seizure as he flips through menus. Flip, subtitle settings, flip, stereo or mono, flip, picture size, flip flip flip. "Do I look like the arbiter of Leonard's computer?"

"The what?"

"To reiterate: Look it up."

"On what?"

His face undergoes a freakish series of twitches, kind of like last night when he was trying to comfort her in the hospital's waiting room. After the sort of long and grueling internal war that most people only go through when they're trying to decide if they should pull the plug on their comatose grandmother, he finally arrives at something resembling a conclusion. "If I make you another snow cone, will you sit quietly for the duration of this episode?"

"Yes!" she chirps. Snow cones, she loves snow cones, and she's pretty sure Sheldon (a) knows that and (b) is perfectly capable of using it to manipulate her.

(It occurs to her that Leonard doesn't know how much she loves snow cones--)

Anyway. Snow cones. Back home in Nebraska, she and her friends--not all of them cheerleaders--would hit the snow cone stand before every home football game. The Snow Shack, it was called, and it really wasn't much more than a shack, but when the weather was warm kids from ages four through thirty would pack the parking lot, slouched on picnic tables or tailgates or sprawled on the ground.

(It occurs to her that maybe her childhood wasn't so different from Sheldon's. She always imagines him as a lonely little kid, but--)

*

If that night is the beginning of the end and that dawn is the middle of the end, the end of the end comes a round eighteen hours later, when Leonard walks in the door.

No. The real end comes before even that.

*

She drums her heels against the couch; Sheldon shoots her a look from where he's crouched down to calibrate the shaved ice machine, and she tucks her feet up underneath her.

"Do you think Leonard would be angry if I used his computer?"

Sheldon shuts the lid of the ice shaver way harder than is necessary. "If he is and your hideous sham of a relationship dies its inevitable death that much more quickly, then please, be my guest," he bites out. Touchy. He's been like that since the beginning, though, always with the snide remarks but oddly reluctant to put himself in the middle of things. Never mind that he is in the middle of things; she can't pretend to understand Sheldon and Leonard's friendship, which seems crafted of three parts resentment and six parts proximity and forty-seven parts shared love of Battlestar Galactica. Not what her friendships are based on, but hey.

Sheldon must realize how snitty that sounded--or he's just being extra-nice to her because of her shoulder--because in a tone that is nearly contrite he asks, "Orange or root beer?" No offer is made of cherry, because Penny hates artificial cherry flavoring. It tastes like rubber and cough syrup.

"Both?" she asks, and for once Sheldon doesn't do much more than shudder at the suggestion of mixing flavors. He is, of course, one of those people who hates to have foods touch on his plate; he also (surprisingly) eats his hamburgers just like her daddy did, smeared with enough barbecue sauce and bacon to give a heart attack to a pig.

He scoops the ice onto a little paper cone and adds the syrup, brown on one side and fluorescent orange on the other. Then--napkin--and the snow cone is hers. "Thanks, Sheldon," she says, as he perches himself back on His Spot. "You're a really good friend, you know that?"

He turns to her and lifts an eyebrow. She does the Ziploc mime, which must satisfy him, because he restarts the disc from the beginning.

Five minutes in and she's eating her snow cone as slowly as she can, taking long licks and doing her best to preserve what Sheldon calls the "spherical integrity" of the top. The fuzzy edge is starting to fade from her vision and her shoulder's starting to throb, but--her head twinges as she stares at the clock, and anyway why do they even have an analog clock?--there's at least another hour until she gets her next magic pill.

Camping. Hah. For all she knows, Leonard's off cozying it up with the sorority sisters of Phi Beta Kappa (twenty-three hot blonds who just adore camping and nice guys with nasal voices), but she knows that relationships have to be based on this little thing called trust. Whoa there, girl, she tells herself, better to box that thought up and shove it away with all those other secrets and lies. Leonard is sweet, Leonard doesn't steal her stuff, and most importantly, Leonard wants her. (Wants her. She hopes.)

Onscreen, Inara says: "Why are you so fascinated by him?"

The preacher says: "Because he's something of a mystery. Why are you?"

Inara, woman, companion, and intergalactic space-whore (that's what Leonard calls her, laughing, and Howard always chimes in), throws her cards on the table with a panache Penny can only envy. "Because so few men are."

Penny bursts into tears.

*

Here comes the final blow--

*

Penny bursts into tears.

Sheldon, right on cue, panics.

"Penny, what--we had a verbal contract, you can't just--"

"You looked!" she wails, which is not exactly the correct accusation but her medication's wearing off and her stupid shoulder hurts and bite me, she thinks, she thinks you weren't supposed to look. "You weren't supposed to look, Sheldon!"

He swallows. "The hero always peeks, I told you that. It's practically traditional."

"Since when were you the hero?" she sobs, but she already knows the answer to that: He's been the hero since he imbibed caffeine to help her finish a shipment of mail-order hair accessories, he's been the hero since she spent three hours on the phone locating his flash drive, he's been the hero since he loaned her rent money and since he hugged her at Christmas (debate: good gift, or best gift ever) and since he strung her underwear up from a telephone wire (for a man who supposedly reproduces asexually, he sure is familiar with her panties). He's been the hero since he broke into her apartment in the middle of the night to clean, since he propped one hand against his white board and studied her with heavy eyes. He's been the hero since always, and now he's made it impossible to pretend otherwise.

She cries harder. "You weren't supposed to look! It was different when you didn't--when I didn't think--when you weren't--" Snot is now dripping down her face and the sloshy remains of her snow cone are all over her lap; Sheldon scrambles for the box of tissues, but he makes no motion to wipe up the mess, just presses a Kleenex into her sticky hands.

"And you paid for my hospital bill, and you aren't a robot, you're not, and I can't even"--she hiccups--"because Leonard's the closest thing to a freakin' eugenics program and you, you, you love what you do even though you shouldn't--"loved it against all odds, despite his parents and his siblings and his middle-class bible-belt upbringing--"and I love that about you"--she's nearing hysteria now, the cat's clawed its way out--"but Leonard wanted me and you didn't and you keep picking on us and we made out in your spot--"

Penny isn't an attractive crier. Her face turns fire-engine red and her eyes get puffy and she usually manages to produce three times as much snot as a normal person. Some corner of her mind is aware of this even as she's sobbing, even as Sheldon says, "Pay attention, because I am only going to do this once."

And then he takes her face in his hands and kisses her, tears and all.

Chapter Text

He plays fast and hard with the revelations after that.

She trumps him anyway.

*

"I don't believe in love, not as you conceptualize it," he begins, after he pulls away. "Love is no more than a bundle of crude instincts and neurochemical reactions, i.e. an initial stage of infatuation triggered by dopamine and serotonin followed by a more lasting attachment cemented by elevated levels of oxytocin, the base aim of which is little more than a mammalian drive to ensure the propagation of the species. Furthermore, I always believed that homo novus was above base biological impulses, that concentration and productivity could only be damaged by the distraction of a long-term partnership."

Oh, Penny thinks, too spellbound to speak and too drained to cry anymore. The pit of her stomach lurches, but it's hard to think about physical sensations beyond his hands on her--one cupping her good shoulder, the other still pressed to her cheek. Oh.

"And my parents--" Up to this point his tone has been flat, pouring out polysyllabic word after word with the ease of a man born to academia. (Even though he wasn't, she reminds herself, even though he is.) But now there's just the tiniest hitch to his voice, and she understands the infinite nuances that lie under And my parents--. She remembers the inadvertent revelation that day in the comic book shop, remembers the way his voice rose as he recited Damn it, George and drunk as hell and making Sheldon cry. He has a perfect memory; that conversation had almost certainly been verbatim.

Clearly, Sheldon isn't the only member of the Cooper family who is a complete and total emotional fucktard.

And now she wonders why she didn't see it before--she pegged the rest of her boys' dysfunctions almost from the beginning, recognized early on that Howard's sleazy overcompensation and Raj's muteness and Leonard's--well, the way Leonard throws himself at any woman who shows him a hint of kindness and plenty who don't--she knows and has known that those are all just defense mechanisms. Even the geeky, little-boy obsessions; she won't go so far as to say that they're wholly rooted in empty childhoods and wacko parents and getting beat up too often on the playground, but there's something entirely too escapist about the thousands of comic books and the hundred compulsive viewings of Star Trek to wave either aside as simple hobby.

She wonders how she couldn't see it before; Sheldon's idiosyncrasies are so much more ingrained, almost ritualized, that they seem like a different horse entirely, but now she wonders how much worse Sheldon's isolation must have been, what sort of things he must have gone through--because Sheldon's fracture isn't a painful, deep-seated need for acceptance that manifests itself as a stutter. Sheldon shuns human contact entirely.

Sheldon doesn't even think of himself as human.

This comes to her in a flash, the connections made almost instantly, but thank God her painkillers are wearing off because if she said one lick of that out loud Sheldon would be off like a shot. Probably she can't speak; her lips round and she lets out a puff of air, a tiny little, "Oh." She doesn't think he's aware that his thumb is stroking in soft circles against her jaw.

If she can't articulate that tangled mess of intuition, though, a part of her seems determined to say something. "But you tell your mother you love her--" She's arguing in the dark, it feels like. She doesn't even know why she's arguing. This sure doesn't feel like an argument.

Sheldon frowns. "Even I know the different between familial affection and--"

"Say it," she demands.

His thumb stops moving, and, hard-headed as ever, he drags the conversation in a new and horrible direction. "In addition, Leonard is my best friend in the whole world. I don't"--his nose crinkles, like he's trying to sniff out the right word--"poach. Although I can't say the same for..."

Mm, and there it is, that long-dormant dragon rearing its beastly head. She knows it was a rotten thing Leonard did to him, lying about the monopoly--monopole--the experiment, but they all thought Sheldon was over it, that he was just being Sheldon and throwing a typical Sheldon-the-alien fit--now, although his face is smooth, she can read the hairline cracks in his blue, blue eyes.

(How she could have ever thought him a robot--)

"Say it," she hisses, and wraps her fingers around his wrist.

"No," he says, now oddly gentle.

"Why not? Why won't you--"

"Penny, you are so right-brained it's a miracle you can add two and two and not come up with five. Frankly," he says, and the smugness that she absolutely should not find attractive is tugging at the corners of his mouth, "it's a miracle we can communicate at all."

Aha. Now she gets it. Everything between them is an argument.

The way she sees it, she has two options. She can keep her mouth shut and let him herd her into a nice little corner, convince her that, oh, that's she's delusional or that he's made a mistake or that they're just too different--

Or she can woman up, fight dirty, and beat him at this game.

Because, and this is something she's just starting to understand--because the same force that lives in Sheldon is in her, too. It has to be, because otherwise she wouldn't be able to go head-to-head with him, because otherwise she wouldn't have left Kurt even after he threatened to take all the money in their joint account. At eighteen she moved across the country with two suitcases and six-hundred dollars; at seventeen she walked in and out of an abortion clinic by herself, even though people were still shot in Nebraska for That Sort Of Thing; at sixteen she showed up at homecoming with her head held high after her brother was arrested not three hours earlier in the school parking lot for dealing meth. Call it grit or backbone or stubbornness, she's got it in spades.

The next step is logical.

"You," she says, "are a big coward."

*

In traditional Spanish bullfighting, a matador faces the bull on-foot only after the bull has been thoroughly tested by lancers and flagmen. The bull itself is more than eleven-hundred pounds of solid, angry muscle, so first a picador on horseback pierces it just behind the neck and two banderilleros stick it in either shoulder. Only then does the matador enter the ring with his red cape and his sword and face down his enemy in what is perhaps the world's last formalized blood-sport. The matador, if he succeeds in killing the bull, wins no more than the applause of the crowd and, if he has fought exceptionally well, an ear from the bull's corpse.

Penny has no lancers, no horse, and no sword. She charges forward with her red banner anyway, because she stands the chance of winning much, much more than a flesh trophy.

On the other hand, it is possible that she's still high; but if she is, it's more from his kisses than any medication.

*

"Excuse me?" he says, his voice rising on the last note like he's just sucked a roomful of helium.

"You heard me," she says. "Coward."

And then she proves that even if he is chickenshit, she isn't, because she swings a knee over his legs and straddles him.

"What do you think you're doing?" Low, urgent, definitely not in control: She's flipped off the safety.

"You listen to me, Sheldon Lee Cooper," she says. Oh, this is going to be good, this is going to be very good; it's as if all of his confidence, all of his arrogance, has seeped into her. Maybe it was that kiss. Maybe it's been building for three years. Maybe Penny's finally got him lined up in her sights. He started this thing when he couldn't keep his stupid blue eyes shut, but she sure as hell is going to finish it.

"You don't get to explain to me why we wouldn't, okay? Have you even thought about what will happen if I pay attention, huh? You think about that? What if I marry Leonard, Sheldon? You'd get to watch, front row seats as I walk down that aisle--" Oh yeah, she's got him now and he doesn't even know it; his arm is flexed beneath her palm and his jaw is clenched tight enough to shatter his teeth. She can handle him, now that she knows he's male underneath all that sanitizer. She can put up with the schedules and the nagging and the accidental hurtfulness, now that she knows that he can, that does love her, and with the intense, almost fanatic devotion he brings to everything that matters. It's written all over his face, in an expression so transparent she marvels.

"Maybe we'll make you godfather, huh, would you like that? Or I'll move in over here with Leonard and you can have my place. Maybe I'll leave the bed for you, Sheldon, how 'bout that?"

"Penny--"

"You're so sure that Leonard and I are going to fall apart, but what if that doesn't happen? Can you take another six months of waking up to me in the kitchen wearing his clothes? How about another six years? How about a lifetime?" She's practically hissing in his ear now; the cords along his neck are standing out in sharp relief.

"Penny--"

"Are you just going to stand by and watch as we fizzle out? What if we're already married the first time his interest wanders, you gonna just pat me on the hand while I cry and send me back to him? How's that working for you, Sheldon? How does that sound--"

"Stop," he snarls. His hands close like vices around her wrists and he pushes her back, away, but she dips her neck and rests her forehead against his. That eloquent gesture disarms him; the circle of his fingers turns from restraint to caress.

"Sheldon. What do you want?"

"What I want is irrelevant." His certainty breaks her heart.

"No, sweetie, it's not," she says. "What do you want?"

He gives a little wet hiccup, and she realizes that Sheldon Cooper, that Sheldon Cooper, is himself on the verge of tears. "I want to label you," he says, without looking at her. "I would like to label you and put you away neatly where you belong so I can move on. You persistently refuse to fit into a neat category, however. You make me angry. You tell me I'm wrong. I don't want to--"

"To what?" she whispers.

"I don't want to--"

"Say it."

Finally, inevitably, he lifts his eyes to lock with hers. There's the expected drag of reluctance, but she can also read a fierce, impossible joy caged just under his skin. And he says, then he actually says and she can't keep her own joy under lock anymore, she smiles at him like he's the sun and the moon.

He says: "I don't want to love you."

"So don't," she counters, effortlessly.

"It isn't that easy," he admits, an admission that would normally bowl her over, but right now she's so far above her daily frame of reference that that there's no room for astonishment.

"Then I guess you've got the rest of your life to label me," she says. "I'm not going anywhere."

"...Yes?"

"Yes," she answers, and twines her fingers with his, and lays one on him. His kisses are dry like fine wine and clean like spring, structured and elegant and unlike anything she's ever known before. Bazinga, she thinks, nonsensically, and kisses him again.

She pulls away to breathe. "The truth isn't so bad, is it?"

"No," he tells her throat, and then, some time later, "Penny, what are we going to tell Leonard?"

"Lies," she says. "Lots of lies."

"I can't lie!"

She sighs. "Then we're honest, I guess. Might as well go for broke."

"And then what?"

Penny curls around him and buries her face in the crook of his neck. "And then you buy me some adhesive ducks for the bathtub," she says. Exhaustion is staring to set in; she's been strapped to an emotional roller coaster for the past hour, and she still hasn't had her next painkiller. She could really, really use a nap right about now.

"And then what?" Sheldon asks again. Is he asking just to keep her talking, or because he just wants to know, or because...

Does it matter?

"And then I teach you all about the difference between having coffee and having coffee. Which looks like it'll be a lot of fun," she adds. "And then you win the Nobel Prize and I star in a box-office hit. And then you retire and drive me crazy with all your free time and I don't even care."

"You seem to have skipped some fairly vital steps." Sheldon's voice is a deep rumble under her ear.

"We'll fill in the blanks later," she murmurs. She is, literally, seconds from drifting off, as content as she can ever remember being.

"Penny? Are you falling asleep?"

"Mmhm," she purrs.

Sheldon clears his throat. "While you're sleeping," he says, "would you like me to make an appointment to have your engine checked?"

She cracks an eye. "Hey, Sheldon? You know how that whole listening-to-me thing worked out pretty well a few minutes ago?"

"I suppose--"

"Then shut up and hold me."

For the second time today, he defers to her better judgment.