the post script plurality {sheldon/penny}
Title: The Post Script Plurality
Fandom: The Big Bang Theory
Characters/Pairings: Sheldon/Penny.
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 1,902
Prompt: #42 - Months for 100_tales
Author's Note: I played fast and loose with the timeline. Forgive me.
Summary: Post S2 finale. There's a note on the bed. Three months of coffee deprivation, missing socks, and broken laptops pass, and she waits.
1.
The weather turns unnaturally humid three days after the boys leave. Heat wave, warnings of wildfires abound, and Penny goes about her business with relative disregard towards the weather. Her mind is elsewhere.
She switches her shifts at the Cheesecake Factory to run a little later, just enough to account for the fact that she won’t have the boys across the hall with takeout and chatter, references and science jokes that fly over her head, to come home to, and for the first two weeks she manages not to miss them all that much.
The third Saturday that they’re gone she discovers she’s out of coffee and doesn’t think twice when she shoves her key in the door and not only uses their coffee but uses their coffeemaker as well. It’s all about convenience on this oddly early morning.
It doesn’t take long for the smell of coffee to perfume the air, and it makes her think of Sheldon, of his ridiculously hyper reaction the one time he ever drank the stuff, of his inability to understand just what she meant by the term ‘coffee’.
Unconsciously, she starts humming one of his sea shanties, wandering about the empty apartment. There’s a thin layer of dust that’s starting to cover the counter, barely enough for her to notice until she sweeps her fingers over it, but more than enough to send Sheldon into a cleaning frenzy as is. When he gets back, this apartment’s going to be turned upside down until every inch of it is immaculate she has a feeling.
She flips on the television, turns the volume down on low, so she can’t hear every gurgle that the coffeemaker makes, and continues on, hesitating at the top of the hallway. On some level, she knows going any further down the hall essentially will lead her to the bathroom and their bedrooms, the latter being none of her business, but her feet keep moving.
Leonard’s door is cracked open, as is the one to the bathroom, which looks to be the last place the guys were in judging by the way the mat on the floor is disheveled, the cold water knob on the sink not turned off completely, dripping water droplets in ten second intervals for the past three weeks.
Sheldon’s door is closed. It doesn’t deter her.
His room is exactly like she remembered it from the last time she was inside it. Nothing ever changes with him, and she’s just about to shake her head and close the door again when she glances one stark change out of the corner of her eye.
A piece of paper sits on his pillowcase, and she moves towards it, expecting calculations or notes or something Sheldon-y, but instead finding a legitimate note, more specifically a note addressed to her.
Penny,
In case you have forgotten the rules in my absence, here is a refresher: people can’t be in my bedroom. Please leave.
Also don’t steal our milk - by now it will surely have expired.
Really, it should make her annoyed. Instead, it makes her smile.
With fairly little effort, she finds a pen and, flipping the note over, writes on the back:
Sheldon,
It wasn’t your milk I stole.
She adds a smiley face and sets both the note and the pen right back where she found them. Without a doubt, she knows that the ambiguity of the sentence will drive him insane the moment he reads it. She’s more than okay with that, perhaps even a little excited.
Penny closes the door firmly behind her without doing any more damage, curling up on their couch to wait for her coffee to be done, her head against the pillow, right in his spot.
---
2.
There are fireworks. And music. And dancing. It’s fourth of July and she’s out with a really drunk set of co-workers, minus the designated driver that they all need right now.
Penny accidentally-on-purpose dials Sheldon and Leonard’s number, and listens to it ring five times before the answering machine picks up. She leaves no message. Instead she sighs and tries not to think of how Leonard would’ve dropped everything and braved traffic to boot to come get her.
And then she calls a cab.
Sunday she sleeps straight through to noon, rising for aspirin and the coffee that this time she actually has in the house. She does laundry that evening, a week or two later than she probably should’ve waited.
There’s a black and purple striped sock that goes through with her stuff, one of Sheldon’s that she’d found mixed in with her stuff last time and forgotten about giving back to him, the consequences of doing laundry together on Saturday nights. This time she drops her stuff off in her apartment and makes use of her emergency key for the second time in as many months.
The sock gets deposited on his bed, next to the note, and, after a moment of contemplation, she finds the pen from earlier and adds to the back of the note, underneath her initial note:
P.S. - Your other sock wasn’t what I stole either. And maybe if you didn’t insist on teaching me to fold laundry properly your stuff wouldn’t end up mixed up in mine.
The latter sentence is half-hearted jibing. Mostly.
July passes, uneventful.
---
3.
In August, there is rain. It puts an end to the talk of wildfires and almost drought, and when she has to duck under an umbrella between the car and the Cheesecake Factory three days in a row, it almost strikes her as abnormal.
Then again, a lot of things about the last few months strike her as abnormal.
Some nights, she watches the rain fall outside of her window, the brightest light in the room being that of her laptop. It’s on one of those nights were she leans over to grab her sweatshirt off of the back of the chair across from her and her elbow collides with a two-thirds full glass of water that splatters onto her computer, seeping into the keyboard and everything else five seconds before the screen goes black.
She takes it to one of those computer places that’s kind of like a stationary geeks on call, and the perfectly nice guy behind the counter, who both does not look like any kind of geek she’s ever known and both smiles and half-flirts with her, tells her he’ll take a look and get back to her within three days.
He calls her back in two.
“It might be salvageable,” he prefaces with, “but I recommend you take it back to whoever did maintenance on it last time.”
She almost wants to ask how he even knows that it’s been worked on before, but instead goes with, “Why?”
“I’m pretty sure that the wiring’s been tweaked. Whoever worked on it last is either really smart or really dumb.”
And instantaneously she knows the answer to that question. “It’s the first one. And thanks anyways.”
Her broken laptop comes home with her, and she sets it on the coffee table, hesitating for a moment before she darts across the hall. It’s a rinse and repeat situation, by now.
P.P.S. - It was almost your laptop. Mine’s broken. People whose actual job it is to repair computers couldn’t figure out what you did to it. Congratulations. Now please come back and fix it.
She repeats the ‘please come back’ part, but only in her head. It won’t change anything even if it’s put on paper.
The rain still falls.
---
4.
The morning that marks three months and two days since they left, if she was actually, you know, counting, she wakes with a start.
At first she can’t put her finger on why. There is the soft buzz of her air conditioner, the distant sound of cars outside of her window, the sound her digital alarm clock makes, a soft click, as the numbers change to 8:05. Then, the sound of something knocking against her coffee table or the counter.
Only the last one is out of the ordinary.
Quietly, she tiptoes out of her room, unnerved at the noise, at her inability to find a reasonable explanation for what was making it. For what had just made it again.
She finds it on her couch, watching her laptop boot up.
“Sheldon?” She asks, slack-jawed and confused.
“Ah, yes, Penny,” he says, as if those aren’t his first words to her in over three months, “your laptop is fixed, as requested. Although I have to say whatever incompetent fool you left it with only exacerbated the problem. They should really consider looking into a career change.”
She launches herself at him. It’s irrational and ill-advised but her arms are around his neck as she kneels on the couch, and it has nothing at all to do with her laptop. His body is completely stiff for a few seconds before he relaxes against her in tiny increments, his hand just falling against the small of her back, and then she’s pulling away with a smile on her lips.
For his part, he remains relatively unfazed. “Now I can tell Leonard that I was, in fact, correct in my assumptions.”
The statement confuses her, a fact that is both unsurprising and comforting to her. Some things will never change. “About what?”
“When we arrived home late last night I went to inform you, only to have that attempt interceded and shot down by Leonard, claiming that we should just let you sleep. And then again this morning when I decided to come here and fix your laptop, something you yourself requested I do.”
As with most things relating to human interaction, Sheldon looks well and truly puzzled by this.
“I believe he brought up the time we cleaned your apartment and you in turn divested us of our key. However, I argued that since you had apparently already invaded our apartment while we were gone, I might as well return the favor.”
Leonard had a point. However so did Sheldon. A year ago, Leonard’s would have won out. Now though, she’s so happy to have Sheldon sitting here, instead of in the Artic Circle or whatever, she doesn’t care about the whys.
So she hugs him. Again. For lack of anything else to say or do.
“Penny,” she starts, remarkably at ease, considering the way her arms are looped around him and his face is barely an inch away from the top of her head. “What did you steal?”
It takes her too long to connect his question back to the note, back to all the silly things she wrote. “Coffee,” she replies, simply, as she disentangles herself once more.
He frowns. “Is that one of your little code words that I don’t understand?”
She has to bite her lip to keep from laughing. Maybe even to keep from kissing him and showing him what that word can really mean (it will take a bit longer to own up to that). “No, sweetie, it’s not.”
“Good. Because between multiple flights, cleaning my own apartment all night and fixing your laptop this morning, I am rather tired. Sleep deprivation is generally not conducive to enabling me to understand your strange need to say something other than what you actually mean.”
“I missed you too, Sheldon,” she says, and means it.
Fandom: The Big Bang Theory
Characters/Pairings: Sheldon/Penny.
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 1,902
Prompt: #42 - Months for 100_tales
Author's Note: I played fast and loose with the timeline. Forgive me.
Summary: Post S2 finale. There's a note on the bed. Three months of coffee deprivation, missing socks, and broken laptops pass, and she waits.
1.
The weather turns unnaturally humid three days after the boys leave. Heat wave, warnings of wildfires abound, and Penny goes about her business with relative disregard towards the weather. Her mind is elsewhere.
She switches her shifts at the Cheesecake Factory to run a little later, just enough to account for the fact that she won’t have the boys across the hall with takeout and chatter, references and science jokes that fly over her head, to come home to, and for the first two weeks she manages not to miss them all that much.
The third Saturday that they’re gone she discovers she’s out of coffee and doesn’t think twice when she shoves her key in the door and not only uses their coffee but uses their coffeemaker as well. It’s all about convenience on this oddly early morning.
It doesn’t take long for the smell of coffee to perfume the air, and it makes her think of Sheldon, of his ridiculously hyper reaction the one time he ever drank the stuff, of his inability to understand just what she meant by the term ‘coffee’.
Unconsciously, she starts humming one of his sea shanties, wandering about the empty apartment. There’s a thin layer of dust that’s starting to cover the counter, barely enough for her to notice until she sweeps her fingers over it, but more than enough to send Sheldon into a cleaning frenzy as is. When he gets back, this apartment’s going to be turned upside down until every inch of it is immaculate she has a feeling.
She flips on the television, turns the volume down on low, so she can’t hear every gurgle that the coffeemaker makes, and continues on, hesitating at the top of the hallway. On some level, she knows going any further down the hall essentially will lead her to the bathroom and their bedrooms, the latter being none of her business, but her feet keep moving.
Leonard’s door is cracked open, as is the one to the bathroom, which looks to be the last place the guys were in judging by the way the mat on the floor is disheveled, the cold water knob on the sink not turned off completely, dripping water droplets in ten second intervals for the past three weeks.
Sheldon’s door is closed. It doesn’t deter her.
His room is exactly like she remembered it from the last time she was inside it. Nothing ever changes with him, and she’s just about to shake her head and close the door again when she glances one stark change out of the corner of her eye.
A piece of paper sits on his pillowcase, and she moves towards it, expecting calculations or notes or something Sheldon-y, but instead finding a legitimate note, more specifically a note addressed to her.
Penny,
In case you have forgotten the rules in my absence, here is a refresher: people can’t be in my bedroom. Please leave.
Also don’t steal our milk - by now it will surely have expired.
Really, it should make her annoyed. Instead, it makes her smile.
With fairly little effort, she finds a pen and, flipping the note over, writes on the back:
Sheldon,
It wasn’t your milk I stole.
She adds a smiley face and sets both the note and the pen right back where she found them. Without a doubt, she knows that the ambiguity of the sentence will drive him insane the moment he reads it. She’s more than okay with that, perhaps even a little excited.
Penny closes the door firmly behind her without doing any more damage, curling up on their couch to wait for her coffee to be done, her head against the pillow, right in his spot.
---
2.
There are fireworks. And music. And dancing. It’s fourth of July and she’s out with a really drunk set of co-workers, minus the designated driver that they all need right now.
Penny accidentally-on-purpose dials Sheldon and Leonard’s number, and listens to it ring five times before the answering machine picks up. She leaves no message. Instead she sighs and tries not to think of how Leonard would’ve dropped everything and braved traffic to boot to come get her.
And then she calls a cab.
Sunday she sleeps straight through to noon, rising for aspirin and the coffee that this time she actually has in the house. She does laundry that evening, a week or two later than she probably should’ve waited.
There’s a black and purple striped sock that goes through with her stuff, one of Sheldon’s that she’d found mixed in with her stuff last time and forgotten about giving back to him, the consequences of doing laundry together on Saturday nights. This time she drops her stuff off in her apartment and makes use of her emergency key for the second time in as many months.
The sock gets deposited on his bed, next to the note, and, after a moment of contemplation, she finds the pen from earlier and adds to the back of the note, underneath her initial note:
P.S. - Your other sock wasn’t what I stole either. And maybe if you didn’t insist on teaching me to fold laundry properly your stuff wouldn’t end up mixed up in mine.
The latter sentence is half-hearted jibing. Mostly.
July passes, uneventful.
---
3.
In August, there is rain. It puts an end to the talk of wildfires and almost drought, and when she has to duck under an umbrella between the car and the Cheesecake Factory three days in a row, it almost strikes her as abnormal.
Then again, a lot of things about the last few months strike her as abnormal.
Some nights, she watches the rain fall outside of her window, the brightest light in the room being that of her laptop. It’s on one of those nights were she leans over to grab her sweatshirt off of the back of the chair across from her and her elbow collides with a two-thirds full glass of water that splatters onto her computer, seeping into the keyboard and everything else five seconds before the screen goes black.
She takes it to one of those computer places that’s kind of like a stationary geeks on call, and the perfectly nice guy behind the counter, who both does not look like any kind of geek she’s ever known and both smiles and half-flirts with her, tells her he’ll take a look and get back to her within three days.
He calls her back in two.
“It might be salvageable,” he prefaces with, “but I recommend you take it back to whoever did maintenance on it last time.”
She almost wants to ask how he even knows that it’s been worked on before, but instead goes with, “Why?”
“I’m pretty sure that the wiring’s been tweaked. Whoever worked on it last is either really smart or really dumb.”
And instantaneously she knows the answer to that question. “It’s the first one. And thanks anyways.”
Her broken laptop comes home with her, and she sets it on the coffee table, hesitating for a moment before she darts across the hall. It’s a rinse and repeat situation, by now.
P.P.S. - It was almost your laptop. Mine’s broken. People whose actual job it is to repair computers couldn’t figure out what you did to it. Congratulations. Now please come back and fix it.
She repeats the ‘please come back’ part, but only in her head. It won’t change anything even if it’s put on paper.
The rain still falls.
---
4.
The morning that marks three months and two days since they left, if she was actually, you know, counting, she wakes with a start.
At first she can’t put her finger on why. There is the soft buzz of her air conditioner, the distant sound of cars outside of her window, the sound her digital alarm clock makes, a soft click, as the numbers change to 8:05. Then, the sound of something knocking against her coffee table or the counter.
Only the last one is out of the ordinary.
Quietly, she tiptoes out of her room, unnerved at the noise, at her inability to find a reasonable explanation for what was making it. For what had just made it again.
She finds it on her couch, watching her laptop boot up.
“Sheldon?” She asks, slack-jawed and confused.
“Ah, yes, Penny,” he says, as if those aren’t his first words to her in over three months, “your laptop is fixed, as requested. Although I have to say whatever incompetent fool you left it with only exacerbated the problem. They should really consider looking into a career change.”
She launches herself at him. It’s irrational and ill-advised but her arms are around his neck as she kneels on the couch, and it has nothing at all to do with her laptop. His body is completely stiff for a few seconds before he relaxes against her in tiny increments, his hand just falling against the small of her back, and then she’s pulling away with a smile on her lips.
For his part, he remains relatively unfazed. “Now I can tell Leonard that I was, in fact, correct in my assumptions.”
The statement confuses her, a fact that is both unsurprising and comforting to her. Some things will never change. “About what?”
“When we arrived home late last night I went to inform you, only to have that attempt interceded and shot down by Leonard, claiming that we should just let you sleep. And then again this morning when I decided to come here and fix your laptop, something you yourself requested I do.”
As with most things relating to human interaction, Sheldon looks well and truly puzzled by this.
“I believe he brought up the time we cleaned your apartment and you in turn divested us of our key. However, I argued that since you had apparently already invaded our apartment while we were gone, I might as well return the favor.”
Leonard had a point. However so did Sheldon. A year ago, Leonard’s would have won out. Now though, she’s so happy to have Sheldon sitting here, instead of in the Artic Circle or whatever, she doesn’t care about the whys.
So she hugs him. Again. For lack of anything else to say or do.
“Penny,” she starts, remarkably at ease, considering the way her arms are looped around him and his face is barely an inch away from the top of her head. “What did you steal?”
It takes her too long to connect his question back to the note, back to all the silly things she wrote. “Coffee,” she replies, simply, as she disentangles herself once more.
He frowns. “Is that one of your little code words that I don’t understand?”
She has to bite her lip to keep from laughing. Maybe even to keep from kissing him and showing him what that word can really mean (it will take a bit longer to own up to that). “No, sweetie, it’s not.”
“Good. Because between multiple flights, cleaning my own apartment all night and fixing your laptop this morning, I am rather tired. Sleep deprivation is generally not conducive to enabling me to understand your strange need to say something other than what you actually mean.”
“I missed you too, Sheldon,” she says, and means it.