the post tryptophan consumption polygon {tbbt - sheldon/penny}
Title: The Post Tryptophan Consumption Polygon
Fandom: The Big Bang Theory
Characters/Pairings: Sheldon/Penny, Leonard/Penny.
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 6,032
Author's Note: The concept for this is courtesy of bebitched
Summary: Post 3.08 - TADD. Thanksgiving dinner goes horribly awry.
It’s like flipping a switch.
“You slept with him?”
More than anything, it catches her off guard. If she had been quicker, if the words had come freely, then some of this probably could’ve been avoided.
Instead: the recently opened door slams back into its frame, with Leonard on the inside of it. Penny leaves the kitchen area, going towards him and then stopping at the last moment, finding herself somewhere in the middle of the room, by the hallway. The sink is running, and Sheldon is methodically washing dishes, acting only somewhat aware of where this conversation is inevitably headed.
She enjoys the silence because she knows it’s not going to last more than a few more seconds.
---
Three weeks ago, she asked around her friends to see who was going to be in town for Thanksgiving, and for those who would be whether or not they’d want to do some kind of Thanksgiving thing at her place.
It was a short list.
It got even shorter after the question “who else will be there?”
“The guy who kept trying to explain football?”
“Is that the dude who just would not shut up during the game?”
“The tall one who knocked on the open door?”
“You’re kidding right?”
Penny wasn’t exactly surprised by the response.
One by one, people dropped out after that. Her friend Amy found out that her grandmother wasn’t doing so well and decided to go back to Wisconsin for the holiday. Jimmy’s psycho girlfriend wanted him to come out with her to see her parents, which was fine because Penny really hated Jimmy’s girlfriend. Sam broke his leg playing tackle football when a friend of his, practically twice his size, knocked him to the ground.
And that was how Thanksgiving festivities were cancelled.
“It’ll just be the five of us,” she says, with a smile and a shrug. Big dinners tended to be chaotic anyway, and her apartment wasn’t exactly suited to them. They’d just do it at the guys’ apartment since it was already cleaned already.
“Three actually,” Sheldon corrects, before Leonard can. “Howard and Raj will be attending Howard’s mothers’ Thanksgiving dinner.”
She nods. Down to three now. “Guess that Turbriskefil must be a real draw.”
“Yes apparently.”
Leonard laughs silently and she has to cover her own mouth to keep hers inside. Sheldon, oblivious to the intended sarcasm, pours himself some juice.
It’s one of the last times the three of them would be in the same room before things got complicated.
---
“You slept with him,” Leonard repeats. It’s no longer a question; now it’s a fact, a statement, a realization in his mind.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” she says, finally, and it would’ve sounded a lot more take charge and intimidating if she’d said it after his first exclamation. Whatever; she’ll take it. “Way to jump to conclusions.”
He scratches his head in this kind of mocking, superior way, which should be impossible but it sure isn’t for him. Then, after the pause necessary for her to notice this, he says, “Okay, then please enlighten me as to how the hell he saw you naked otherwise?”
“Uh, did you fail to notice the fact that I dislocated my shoulder? After slipping in the shower?” For the first time she’s glad she’s still wearing that stupid sling because she can point to exhibit A just like that. It makes her feel superior, considering he’s a genius and all. “What, do you think I got up, got dressed and then drove myself to the hospital?”
Leonard absolutely balks at that prospect. “He dressed you?”
“What did you want me to do? Call the landlord? Call you to come drive a couple of hours to help? Cause I definitely felt like waiting.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about this?”
“You never asked!”
“Maybe I would’ve if you hadn’t decided that breaking up with me within the first five minutes I was back was a good idea.”
She makes a noise that’s between a growl and a frustrated scream, turning to Sheldon, who’s been mute for this entire thing. He’s still washing dishes, frantically now, and he’s got the deer in headlights thing down. “Are you going to say anything?”
His lips remain closed. Penny marvels at how he’s so damn social when she doesn’t want him to be (particularly about two minutes ago when his leading comment set Leonard off), and yet when she wants him to talk he’s suddenly out of words in that infinite vocabulary of his.
Thanksgiving dinner is nothing but a lead pit in her stomach.
---
Two weeks ago, she slipped in the shower.
Drugged and giggling like a fifteen year old version of herself, Penny rationalized kissing the hero of her story somewhere in her head. Of course, that’s how she figures it might have gone down.
She doesn’t actually remember.
Penny remembers the accident, remembers the waiting room, even the car ride back and standing in the hallway while Sheldon unlocked her door, her purse over his shoulder like his messenger bag usually was. She made a joke about him getting her into bed and distantly felt ‘soft kitty’ humming through her body, but when Sheldon tells her she made him do a round with her, sometime the next morning, she draws a blank.
When she wakes up and Sheldon’s still there, moving like he’s unsure of his own body, his own routine, for the first time since she’s known him, she can’t make any sense of it. She draws a blank.
“You didn’t clean my apartment in the middle of the night again, did you?” She asks, scrubbing at her eyes with her good hand. It doesn’t look spotless like it did last time, though her couch and coffee table have been cleared off. He’s working on the kitchen. It’s scary how much she can’t bring herself to care that he reorganizes her place every time he sets foot there for any long period of time.
“Hardly. Though it badly needs it.” He is, of course, in the process of toweling off a plate as he says this. “When would I have had the time?”
“Um,” she looks around for a clock, locates the one on the cable box and blinks. “It’s five thirty in the morning.” She doesn’t mean to say it out loud really, it just sort of comes out. “Why are either of us awake?”
“You missed your latest round of painkillers three hours ago because you refused my efforts to make you take them, so perhaps your need for them has finally caught up with you.” He says it without looking up at her. There’s an orange and white pill bottle on the coffee table, which is in fact the only thing on the coffee table other than the remote, and she notices that, yes, her arm does hurt, a lot in fact.
Somewhere in her hazy mind, in the process of walking over to the table to retrieve that bottle, the rest of his sentence catches up with her. “I went to sleep when?”
“Two-thirty five.”
That can’t be right. The last time she remembers seeing the clock was at nine. “What the hell was I doing until two-thirty in the morning?”
Now he looks at her, like he’s evaluating her mental state or studying her or something. Then he nods, mostly to himself. “Memory loss due to lack of resistance to pain killers isn’t abnormal.”
She blinks. “Excuse me?”
That thing with the abnormal movements that she noticed when she first woke up becomes more obvious. He kind of stills over the sink, towel in his hand and the water running uninterrupted straight down the drain. Sheldon turns it off when he’s not using it, pretty much always, but here he doesn’t seem to notice it. His free hand, the one not in the possession of the towel, is curved unnaturally, fingers the only thing resting on the counter. He seems stiff, not that Sheldon’s usual an incredibly loose and relaxed person, but everything about the way he carries himself seems even more rigid than normal.
Penny switches tactics, deciding that maybe direct is the way to go here. “Okay, what happened last night?”
A lengthy pause, then, “Penny, perhaps it is better that the content of last night’s discussion is disregarded, due to your drug-addled state.”
This only confirms that whatever she said or did last night is what’s got him all…off-kilter. And it only makes her push that much harder. She abandons the pill bottle, instead choosing to take a few steps closer to him. “What did I say?”
He makes a face. “You swore me to secrecy. I would think you of all people would know just how hard it is for me to keep a secret and congratulate me on my insofar successful efforts.”
“Sheldon,” she exclaims, harshly, advancing on him yet again. He draws back noticeably, exactly like the easily spooked deer his mother once compared him to. “Why would I want you to keep something I told you secret from myself? In what language does that even make sense?”
Some of the fight seems to go out of him then. It’s the first time that it’s really occurred to her that Sheldon’s been awake this entire time, probably since very early yesterday morning. He looks tired under the bright lighting and without the aid of any form of caffeine that she tends to mainline in situations like these. “I never made any claim to understand relationships. In fact, I have more than once admitted that such social interactions are one of the few things that puzzle me. But what I truly cannot begin to comprehend - what seems even more out of place than these ridiculous compromises and efforts you make to please the other person in said relationship - is why you would choose to spend ample time with, not to mention remain in a relationship with, someone who has so altered their behavior around you in ways that you clearly find distasteful.”
Instantly, Penny moves to curl her arms around herself, suddenly self-conscious to the point of literally feeling like he’s under her skin and in her head, but the sling plus the pain that shoots through her arm prevents her from doing that. She settles for backing up a step, for freezing from there. She wants to tell him that it’s all bullshit, that it’s just the drugs and she was just upset and injured, but she can’t because it’s not, and the longer she knows him the more she hates to lie to someone who can’t lie to her.
“Moreover, why a woman such as yourself, who has clearly had no trouble finding her share of sexual partners, would lower their standards and accept such behaviors as nothing more than a highly unfortunate occurrence, is baffling to me.”
She doesn’t know whether to be angry, offended, upset, or relieved. Maybe she’s all of those things. Penny needs a point of reference for all these things he’s saying, needs the context behind this conversation. And she knows he can give it to her because Sheldon remembers everything, whether it’s written word or spoken. “Okay, what exactly did I say?”
“You told me that you weren’t pleased by the way Leonard’s behavior and overall attitude has changed since you embarked on this relationship and that you sometimes wish that he would just be himself and not act like what he seems to believe you want him to be.”
Yeah. She totally said that. Not in that wording but she doesn’t find it hard to believe that at some point in her several hour blackout those words spilled out of her. These are things that she’s thought, somewhere in the back of her mind, and then brushed off. Leonard’s a nice guy, Leonard’s a change, Leonard’s better for her than the status quo of the past. Except sometimes he tries to hard, and sometimes he lets his insecurities get the better of him and he gets mean, and most of the time he’s a pale impersonation of the guy she met and befriended years ago.
“I still feel that it’s better for everyone if the events of last night are just written off,” he says, in answer to her silence.
Penny laughs, though it’s not because anything about this is all that funny. “I think the beans are pretty much spilled, Sheldon. I don’t know what else you could possibly have left out.”
“Penny, you kissed me last night.”
So it gets worse, apparently. She gets this sinking feeling in her gut, just barely managing a somewhat-hopeful, “Yeah but on the cheek right?”
“I believe you called me your hero and, as I have often heard you refer to it, ‘planted one on me’.”
Her mouth goes dry.
---
“Sheldon!” Leonard finally yells, trying to snap Sheldon out of whatever funk he was in. It did nothing but make him cringe.
“He doesn’t like fighting, remember?” She replies, her voice matching Leonard’s both in volume and tone, and she realizes that’s kind of counterproductive but she isn’t at a point where she feels like she can take a deep breath and calm the hell down. She’s still angry, sort of at the both of them, and Sheldon’s vulnerabilities in this particular situation just aren’t going to erase that fact.
Leonard, of course, calls her out on this. “Well then maybe you shouldn’t be yelling.”
“Oh my god, could you be more hypocritical right now? I wasn’t the one who started this in the first place.”
“Please don’t use playground logic right now,” he says, and she tries to ignore just how much that feels like another potshot at how superior his education or logic or whatever is to hers. It translates into a glare anyway. “And you really didn’t think that this was going to come up at some point?”
“No,” she lies, because if she hadn’t thought that he’d go off the deep end about the thing with Sheldon helping her out of the shower and to get dressed, while she was naked, then she probably would’ve already told him. He could grab her boob, he could see her tattoo, it really made no difference to her. Whatever this situation was with her and Sheldon, it had jack shit to do with what he saw and way more to do with…well, him. “There was nothing to come up. I didn’t sleep with him; he just helped me.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she can see that Sheldon’s given up entirely with the dishes. Instead, his eyes are darting between her and Leonard, not really focused on either of them, and it takes a good amount of thought to determine that it’s not even them he’s looking at. It’s his escape routes, one out the front door and the other to his bedroom, and they’re currently blocking them. For whatever reason, he isn’t chancing trying to pass them right now, instead looking for an opening. If she wasn’t so pissed right now, she might laugh. She might also cry. That’s how stable her moods feel at the moment.
“Well clearly something is going on,” Leonard picks right back up again, barely a pause in between her words and his.
“Oh, how would you know?” She asks, rather stupidly because, as Leonard points out via a totally ridiculous hand gesture and a look, Sheldon wouldn’t be in the current state of relative muteness that he’s in right now if he didn’t feel like he’d done something wrong. Sheldon isn’t one to be wrongly accused. She counters with more half-truths, “He did that when it was just us fighting. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“What is wrong with you?”
”What’s wrong with me? I’m not the one acting completely irrationally. What’s wrong with you?”
“No, you’re just keeping secrets. You aren’t being honest about anything.”
“At least I’m honest with myself.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
If they had been listening to anything but the sound of their own competing voices, maybe they would’ve heard footsteps outside of the door, or the sound of someone fiddling with the doorknob.
They didn’t. And Leonard, who had been leaning against the front door he’d slammed shut at the beginning of this conversation, found himself without that door behind him as Howard and Raj opened it and he fell backwards, failing to catch himself and ending up on his ass. Howard and Raj took a step back, delayed joint reaction. Penny, too shocked to move within those first few seconds, remained in place.
Sheldon, seeing his opening, bolted straight out the front door before anyone could even comprehend what just occurred.
---
For the record, Penny had in no way intended to break up with Leonard the day he came back.
That said, she knew as soon as she woke up for the second time the morning after her little trip to the emergency room that she was going to break up with him. It didn’t directly have anything to do with Sheldon, even if it did indirectly. He’d forced her to confront the things she’d been thinking and feeling for a few weeks now. He sped up the inevitable.
The plan, because she’d bothered to think this through, from the initial deed straight through to all the possible ramifications in the future, was to pretend everything was fine the day he got back and then break it to him the next morning. She felt bad about cornering him as soon as he got home.
See, there was a plan. But plans so rarely work out.
“Hey,” Leonard surprises her from the top of the stairs just as she’s stepping out of her apartment, on the way to get her mail from downstairs. He’s got a bag in each hand but he soon abandons them against the wall, in favor of closing the space between them and capturing her lips with his own. His hands fall against her waist and she finds herself profusely thankful that he didn’t lay a hand anywhere in the vicinity of her injured shoulder which hurt like a son of a bitch. She was avoiding the pain killers.
It’s only after that initial bout of relief that she realizes that he hadn’t even noticed her injury. He’d just gone straight to the kissing, like they’d been apart for weeks instead of a few days.
That must be what does it. She pulls back, breaking the kiss somewhat prematurely, and grasping a hold of his arm with her only free hand. The shock of this, and the absence of her other hand, finally draws his attention to the sling. “Oh my god, what happened?”
“Leonard,” she blurts his name and, after a moment to evaluate what she’s about to do, she goes for broke. “I don’t think this is working.”
“What?” He’s apparently still stuck on the arm because he has to tear his gaze away from the sling back to her face. It makes her a little regretful for jumping straight into this. Not that she could turn back now.
“This. Us.” Words are failing her and it occurs to her that she never scripted this whole thing. She’d thought of reasons but not necessarily ones she was willing to vocalize, and she’d always kind of figured that she’d do it on the spot. Penny’s always found the words easily. She finds herself falling back on excuses, things she’s said before. They’re generic and not at all what she’d meant to say. “We fight all the time. We never did that when we were friends. It was always just so much easier.”
“Yeah but…I mean, couples are supposed to fight,” he starts, defensive and still like he has hope, a chance to turn this around at the eleventh hour.
“This isn’t…” she stops looking at him, her eyes finding his bags against the wall. She’d told him she had to work to avoid going on that trip. She’d lied.
This has been falling apart for awhile.
With renewed confidence, she sets her sights on him once again, locking eyes with him. “The whole thing with this was if it didn’t work we could always go back to being friends. And I like you Leonard, I really do, and I understand that this is going to hurt and you’re going to be mad for awhile, but there’s no way we’re going to make this last for much longer without ending up angry and bitter because we didn’t call it quits earlier. I want to go back to what we were. We’re better that way.”
“I don’t…” she thinks the next word is going to be understand. Maybe a synonym to it. She doesn’t let him get it out. Instead, she presses a kiss to his cheek and scampers off down four flights of stairs at a record-breaking pace.
In the lobby, she calls herself a coward and leans against the wall opposite the mailboxes for a minute to regain some sort of composure. Then she collects her mail, walks back upstairs, and locks herself in her apartment for the duration of the day.
It’s eleven at night when there’s three knocks at her door and she almost asks Sheldon to go away before she rethinks taking the chance of alienating someone else today.
She gets up from the couch to open the door, rather than just yelling at him to let himself in, and when she does, coming face to face with him, he makes no move to enter. He only says, “Leonard is asleep. He was very upset by today’s events.”
Her anger at herself transfers to anger at him in mere seconds and she leans against the doorframe with a sigh. “Thanks for the heads up Sheldon; I kind of figured that out.”
Sheldon doesn’t seem to recognize her tone or her attitude as anything outside of the norm. She doesn’t know why she expected anymore. She watches him fold his hands in front of him, watches his Adam’s apple bob as he swallows, and then, after enough time has passed that she’s wondering just what the hell he’s doing here and whether or not she can shut the door and go back to her still-warm spot on the couch, he says, “I am truly sorry if my candor yesterday morning has caused you the sort of pain that it has apparently caused Leonard. It was certainly not my intention.”
Any irritation she was feeling falls out of her body at that. Penny knows just how rare it is to have him apologize, let alone mean it as sincerely as he seems to right now, and for the second time that day she finds herself pressing a kiss to someone’s cheek, albeit this time on tiptoe. She uses his arm to balance herself, and his hand curls around her elbow, steadying her like it’s a reflex.
“Penny,” he starts, when her feet are firmly back on the ground.
“Goodnight Sheldon,” she says, stopping him before either of them can screw up the one good moment she’s had all day, and closes the door quietly.
He doesn’t knock again.
---
“I don’t understand why we have to do this,” Leonard says, his turn signal on, taking a right on Euclid Avenue. She doesn’t know where they’re going; she’s not sure he does either.
“Because he’s not going to just come back on his own.”
“How do you know?”
“Because last time he did this we had to go get him from the comic book store and buy him things just to get him to leave.”
“Well, the comic book store is closed so we won’t have to worry about that,” Leonard offers, though not in a positive tone.
“So is the Cheesecake Factory,” she adds, racking her brain for the places he might go, “and he wouldn’t go to Raj or Howard’s, since he already knows where they are. Maybe he went to work? Didn’t he like live in his office once?”
“We’ll try that next. It’s on the way.”
To where, she wants to ask but doesn’t. For a long few seconds they drive in absolute silence, the roads more or less clear and the street lights bright in the pitch black darkness. People are probably still visiting with family, finishing up dinner, having nice, normal thanksgivings that don’t end with fighting and driving around searching for your ex-boyfriend’s roommate who you might sort of have feelings for.
The silence can only last so long though. “What did you mean when you said at least you were honest with yourself?”
Penny sinks further back in her seat. This is one of those things that you say in the heat of the moment, when you’re not thinking about clarification and elaboration; you’re just thinking about what you can scream louder over the other person and still sound intelligent while doing so.
She still meant it, so she still owes him an explanation.
In the interest of avoiding another fight in such close quarters, she adopts a softer tone. “Remember all that stuff I said in the hallway? About the fighting and how we were better friends.”
She allows for a sarcastic response, something along the lines of ‘how could I forget?’, but he doesn’t make it, instead saying, “Yeah.”
“I meant all that stuff,” she prefaces, and tries to keep her eyes on those street lights rather than her hands. “But that’s not the reason I broke up with you.”
“Okay, you maybe want to share?” The car veers dangerously close to a parking lot and she sincerely hopes that he isn’t thinking of pulling into one to have this conversation.
“When we were together, you weren’t you. It was like you were so busy trying to be what you thought I wanted that you lost the part of you that I actually liked to begin with.”
He looks at her, for the briefest of seconds, not about to take his eyes off the road for too long. It unnerves her but at the same time it forces her to go on so that he doesn’t have the chance to put up a fight.
“And I thought that would go away after a while but it didn’t,” she shakes her head and switches her gaze to the window. “I think it was about fantasies. I was the hot girl next door that the geeky guy never gets, and you were just the nice guy who’s just so different from everyone I’ve ever dated. And maybe that works for some people but it wasn’t working for us. It wasn’t going to work for us, it was just going to change us, and I didn’t want to get to the point where nothing was salvageable and we couldn’t go back.”
She sighs. She hates the drawn out monologue; hates how sometimes they’re necessary.
“I didn’t want to lose you completely, you know?”
The car comes to a stop and she panics before she realizes that he’s already pulled into CalTech. He doesn’t make any move to get out.
“Leonard?” She tries because she’d really like a reaction to all of that now. Before she wasn’t sure, before she thought that maybe she’d just like to run and hide after she got it all out, to avoid the awkwardness, but now that she’s gone and actually said it she wants to be sure he gets it. It’s not that they’re bad people, it’s just that they really don’t work that way.
“I know,” he says, to the steering wheel, and something lifts within her a little.
---
One week ago, on the couch in his apartment, with Leonard out on some unknown errand, at least to her, she half turns to Sheldon and decides she’s feeling particularly brave.
“What is this?”
He gives her a mostly puzzled look, hand fumbling for the remote. “This is Doctor Who. I explained this to you earlier.”
“No, I mean…” she trails when she watches his finger hover over the pause button with some degree of annoyance. She contemplates leaning in to kiss him, just for the sake of clearing up the topic of this conversation but thinks that might just make things more unclear. This is not a good time. “Never mind.”
Penny wonders if it whatever’s between them deserves a conversation, a definition, dedicated to it. It was just one kiss, one very-drugged kiss that she couldn’t remember and that had thrown him for a loop. And she’d dumped her boyfriend. But not for Sheldon. For herself, for Leonard, for the sake of their friendship down the road.
It still added up in ways that indicated that, yes, there was a reason for this conversation. And they would have it - just maybe not now.
She gives up and shifts her eyes back to the television. After a long few seconds, he relaxes in his seat and stops looking at her.
---
Leonard leads her done one hallway and through another until they end up at Sheldon’s office. They don’t even have to knock to know that’s where he’s holed up because they can hear him rustling around inside. She shoots a glance at Leonard, trying to determine just how they’re going to do this and who’s going to say what.
She doesn’t want to know how he got here without their aid or a car that he could drive at, like, ten miles an hour.
Through some mutual unspoken decision it’s decided that she should be the one to knock, and she does, three times quietly, mimicking him to a degree in hopes that the familiarity will strike some chord within him. “Sheldon?”
All noise inside stops.
“Sweetie, we’re done fighting. We want you to come home.” On the second ‘we’ she glues her eyes to Leonard’s. They’re presenting a united front if it kills them. Not like the comic book store the last time where he didn’t do a damn thing to help. There is still nothing but silence greeting them.
Again, she looks to Leonard and when that doesn’t draw some sort of response out of him she judges him in the leg with her foot, for lack of ability to do it with her shoulder like she might normally. It’s a lot to ask but at the same time it isn’t. Sheldon’s his friend and his roommate and for all they put up with he might as well be family. “Sheldon, seriously, answer the door.”
She ups the ante then, “We’re not leaving until you at least open it.”
Without warning, the door cracks open, swinging ever so slowly and Sheldon comes into view, moving back behind his desk. There are papers and his shuffling of them seem aimless. He’s not focused. She raises an eyebrow at him and when he finally looks up at her, he motions to the by now fully open door. “The door is open. You are now free to leave.”
“No,” she says, entering and wasting no time walking over to his desk, perching herself on the edge of it so that he can’t blatantly ignore her. She’s in his personal space way too much for that. “Sheldon, people fight. All the time. You can’t run away every time.”
“Yes, in fact, I can.” He replies, not yet looking at her but very aware of her presence. “I told you I preferred to avoid having this discussion entirely a number of weeks ago, as I had a feeling it would lead to this. It did. I was right. And in the future, I would hope that you would not push me on such matters.”
“Sheldon,” she half-sighs.
“Penny,” he says, his tone even and emotionless. He’s closed up for the night.
“Sheldon, it’s Thanksgiving,” Leonard tries. When she faces him, she can tell it’s taking some amount of effort not to roll his eyes at the fact that he’s actually having this conversation. “It’s a social obligation to eat dinner and be nice and pretend like everything’s fine. It’s about being thankful for what you have and focusing on that instead of what’s wrong.”
“I never understood why you would put so much effort into something that only lasts a day.”
“Because,” Penny cuts in here, mildly impressed with Leonard’s attempt. “It’s supposed to give you a different perspective on things.”
“I don’t see what that has to do with our current situation. I don’t need a new perspective.”
It’s when she gets that maybe it isn’t him who needs one. Maybe it’s her. Maybe it’s Leonard. Maybe it’s the two of them who need to start thinking about things other than a shitty breakup and the lengths they’ve gone to avoid each other for the past two weeks. There’s the mourning period, standard at the end of all relationships, but there’s only so long that can go on before you’re just doing more damage. Maybe this is where that ends.
Without prompting, Leonard nods at her, their eyes meeting across the room. And somehow they’re back on the same page in ways they haven’t been in too long.
“We’re done, Sheldon. I swear we’re really done. No more fighting. Not tonight and not anytime soon.” She rests her free hand on Sheldon’s shoulder, tentatively, and he doesn’t shrug it off or otherwise move. “Just come home.”
---
Several hours ago, they made it through dinner peacefully but awkwardly. Her and Leonard stumbled and moved around each other carefully, but the food was good and the conversation was light and Penny had actual hope that maybe she’d done the right thing by not canceling.
Her and Leonard told stories of their own respective childhood Thanksgiving traditions, or, really, Leonard’s lack thereof, and occasionally Sheldon interjected something about his own experiences. She talked about her dad taking her hunting for a turkey, Thanksgiving spent on a farm in Nebraska, and found the first part resembled Sheldon’s own celebrations, except she was far less resistant to it, even if actually getting the turkey in the end made her sad.
It was probably what made her a sometimes vegetarian, except on special occasions or where steak is involved.
“My sister hated it. My brother thought it was brave; called her the cowardly lion until she reminded him that she still knew how to work a gun.”
Leonard smiles, something genuine, as he asks, “Is that why your tattoo says courage?”
For a moment there, she means to correct him. That’s not the reason why, although you could probably make a Hallmark story out of it. For a moment, she completely forgets that she’s had a discussion regarding her tattoo not all that long ago, and that it wasn’t with Leonard.
And then Sheldon pipes up and it all falls apart. “No, her tattoo says soup.”
“How do you know what…” Leonard trails, first looking to Sheldon, then her. Something in his eyes changes.
A switch is flipped.
“You slept with him?”
---
Several hours later, between her and Leonard, the kitchen is cleaned and everything is where it’s supposed to be, so as to avoid any minor freakouts from Sheldon in the morning.
He is asleep.
“Thanks,” she offers, when he hands her a towel for the final dish that she’s cleaning. “And not just for the dish.”
“For the…oh. Yeah.” Leonard looks down, the kind of bashful way that he used to, and fiddles with his hands. “Spirit of the holiday right?”
“Sure,” she replies, nodding and putting the glass back in the cabinet. She’d like to think that’s not all it is. “And I’m sorry this happened like this.”
“No, you were right.” He regains the ability to look her in the eye. It’s nice. “I wasn’t me. I was just waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
Penny drops her towel, relieved to hear that he understands where she’s coming from and crosses the room, enveloping him in a one-armed hug that he’s clearly not ready for. “Happy Thanksgiving,” she says, into his ear.
She thinks she’s found her new perspective.
Fandom: The Big Bang Theory
Characters/Pairings: Sheldon/Penny, Leonard/Penny.
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 6,032
Author's Note: The concept for this is courtesy of bebitched
Summary: Post 3.08 - TADD. Thanksgiving dinner goes horribly awry.
It’s like flipping a switch.
“You slept with him?”
More than anything, it catches her off guard. If she had been quicker, if the words had come freely, then some of this probably could’ve been avoided.
Instead: the recently opened door slams back into its frame, with Leonard on the inside of it. Penny leaves the kitchen area, going towards him and then stopping at the last moment, finding herself somewhere in the middle of the room, by the hallway. The sink is running, and Sheldon is methodically washing dishes, acting only somewhat aware of where this conversation is inevitably headed.
She enjoys the silence because she knows it’s not going to last more than a few more seconds.
---
Three weeks ago, she asked around her friends to see who was going to be in town for Thanksgiving, and for those who would be whether or not they’d want to do some kind of Thanksgiving thing at her place.
It was a short list.
It got even shorter after the question “who else will be there?”
“The guy who kept trying to explain football?”
“Is that the dude who just would not shut up during the game?”
“The tall one who knocked on the open door?”
“You’re kidding right?”
Penny wasn’t exactly surprised by the response.
One by one, people dropped out after that. Her friend Amy found out that her grandmother wasn’t doing so well and decided to go back to Wisconsin for the holiday. Jimmy’s psycho girlfriend wanted him to come out with her to see her parents, which was fine because Penny really hated Jimmy’s girlfriend. Sam broke his leg playing tackle football when a friend of his, practically twice his size, knocked him to the ground.
And that was how Thanksgiving festivities were cancelled.
“It’ll just be the five of us,” she says, with a smile and a shrug. Big dinners tended to be chaotic anyway, and her apartment wasn’t exactly suited to them. They’d just do it at the guys’ apartment since it was already cleaned already.
“Three actually,” Sheldon corrects, before Leonard can. “Howard and Raj will be attending Howard’s mothers’ Thanksgiving dinner.”
She nods. Down to three now. “Guess that Turbriskefil must be a real draw.”
“Yes apparently.”
Leonard laughs silently and she has to cover her own mouth to keep hers inside. Sheldon, oblivious to the intended sarcasm, pours himself some juice.
It’s one of the last times the three of them would be in the same room before things got complicated.
---
“You slept with him,” Leonard repeats. It’s no longer a question; now it’s a fact, a statement, a realization in his mind.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” she says, finally, and it would’ve sounded a lot more take charge and intimidating if she’d said it after his first exclamation. Whatever; she’ll take it. “Way to jump to conclusions.”
He scratches his head in this kind of mocking, superior way, which should be impossible but it sure isn’t for him. Then, after the pause necessary for her to notice this, he says, “Okay, then please enlighten me as to how the hell he saw you naked otherwise?”
“Uh, did you fail to notice the fact that I dislocated my shoulder? After slipping in the shower?” For the first time she’s glad she’s still wearing that stupid sling because she can point to exhibit A just like that. It makes her feel superior, considering he’s a genius and all. “What, do you think I got up, got dressed and then drove myself to the hospital?”
Leonard absolutely balks at that prospect. “He dressed you?”
“What did you want me to do? Call the landlord? Call you to come drive a couple of hours to help? Cause I definitely felt like waiting.”
“Why didn’t you tell me about this?”
“You never asked!”
“Maybe I would’ve if you hadn’t decided that breaking up with me within the first five minutes I was back was a good idea.”
She makes a noise that’s between a growl and a frustrated scream, turning to Sheldon, who’s been mute for this entire thing. He’s still washing dishes, frantically now, and he’s got the deer in headlights thing down. “Are you going to say anything?”
His lips remain closed. Penny marvels at how he’s so damn social when she doesn’t want him to be (particularly about two minutes ago when his leading comment set Leonard off), and yet when she wants him to talk he’s suddenly out of words in that infinite vocabulary of his.
Thanksgiving dinner is nothing but a lead pit in her stomach.
---
Two weeks ago, she slipped in the shower.
Drugged and giggling like a fifteen year old version of herself, Penny rationalized kissing the hero of her story somewhere in her head. Of course, that’s how she figures it might have gone down.
She doesn’t actually remember.
Penny remembers the accident, remembers the waiting room, even the car ride back and standing in the hallway while Sheldon unlocked her door, her purse over his shoulder like his messenger bag usually was. She made a joke about him getting her into bed and distantly felt ‘soft kitty’ humming through her body, but when Sheldon tells her she made him do a round with her, sometime the next morning, she draws a blank.
When she wakes up and Sheldon’s still there, moving like he’s unsure of his own body, his own routine, for the first time since she’s known him, she can’t make any sense of it. She draws a blank.
“You didn’t clean my apartment in the middle of the night again, did you?” She asks, scrubbing at her eyes with her good hand. It doesn’t look spotless like it did last time, though her couch and coffee table have been cleared off. He’s working on the kitchen. It’s scary how much she can’t bring herself to care that he reorganizes her place every time he sets foot there for any long period of time.
“Hardly. Though it badly needs it.” He is, of course, in the process of toweling off a plate as he says this. “When would I have had the time?”
“Um,” she looks around for a clock, locates the one on the cable box and blinks. “It’s five thirty in the morning.” She doesn’t mean to say it out loud really, it just sort of comes out. “Why are either of us awake?”
“You missed your latest round of painkillers three hours ago because you refused my efforts to make you take them, so perhaps your need for them has finally caught up with you.” He says it without looking up at her. There’s an orange and white pill bottle on the coffee table, which is in fact the only thing on the coffee table other than the remote, and she notices that, yes, her arm does hurt, a lot in fact.
Somewhere in her hazy mind, in the process of walking over to the table to retrieve that bottle, the rest of his sentence catches up with her. “I went to sleep when?”
“Two-thirty five.”
That can’t be right. The last time she remembers seeing the clock was at nine. “What the hell was I doing until two-thirty in the morning?”
Now he looks at her, like he’s evaluating her mental state or studying her or something. Then he nods, mostly to himself. “Memory loss due to lack of resistance to pain killers isn’t abnormal.”
She blinks. “Excuse me?”
That thing with the abnormal movements that she noticed when she first woke up becomes more obvious. He kind of stills over the sink, towel in his hand and the water running uninterrupted straight down the drain. Sheldon turns it off when he’s not using it, pretty much always, but here he doesn’t seem to notice it. His free hand, the one not in the possession of the towel, is curved unnaturally, fingers the only thing resting on the counter. He seems stiff, not that Sheldon’s usual an incredibly loose and relaxed person, but everything about the way he carries himself seems even more rigid than normal.
Penny switches tactics, deciding that maybe direct is the way to go here. “Okay, what happened last night?”
A lengthy pause, then, “Penny, perhaps it is better that the content of last night’s discussion is disregarded, due to your drug-addled state.”
This only confirms that whatever she said or did last night is what’s got him all…off-kilter. And it only makes her push that much harder. She abandons the pill bottle, instead choosing to take a few steps closer to him. “What did I say?”
He makes a face. “You swore me to secrecy. I would think you of all people would know just how hard it is for me to keep a secret and congratulate me on my insofar successful efforts.”
“Sheldon,” she exclaims, harshly, advancing on him yet again. He draws back noticeably, exactly like the easily spooked deer his mother once compared him to. “Why would I want you to keep something I told you secret from myself? In what language does that even make sense?”
Some of the fight seems to go out of him then. It’s the first time that it’s really occurred to her that Sheldon’s been awake this entire time, probably since very early yesterday morning. He looks tired under the bright lighting and without the aid of any form of caffeine that she tends to mainline in situations like these. “I never made any claim to understand relationships. In fact, I have more than once admitted that such social interactions are one of the few things that puzzle me. But what I truly cannot begin to comprehend - what seems even more out of place than these ridiculous compromises and efforts you make to please the other person in said relationship - is why you would choose to spend ample time with, not to mention remain in a relationship with, someone who has so altered their behavior around you in ways that you clearly find distasteful.”
Instantly, Penny moves to curl her arms around herself, suddenly self-conscious to the point of literally feeling like he’s under her skin and in her head, but the sling plus the pain that shoots through her arm prevents her from doing that. She settles for backing up a step, for freezing from there. She wants to tell him that it’s all bullshit, that it’s just the drugs and she was just upset and injured, but she can’t because it’s not, and the longer she knows him the more she hates to lie to someone who can’t lie to her.
“Moreover, why a woman such as yourself, who has clearly had no trouble finding her share of sexual partners, would lower their standards and accept such behaviors as nothing more than a highly unfortunate occurrence, is baffling to me.”
She doesn’t know whether to be angry, offended, upset, or relieved. Maybe she’s all of those things. Penny needs a point of reference for all these things he’s saying, needs the context behind this conversation. And she knows he can give it to her because Sheldon remembers everything, whether it’s written word or spoken. “Okay, what exactly did I say?”
“You told me that you weren’t pleased by the way Leonard’s behavior and overall attitude has changed since you embarked on this relationship and that you sometimes wish that he would just be himself and not act like what he seems to believe you want him to be.”
Yeah. She totally said that. Not in that wording but she doesn’t find it hard to believe that at some point in her several hour blackout those words spilled out of her. These are things that she’s thought, somewhere in the back of her mind, and then brushed off. Leonard’s a nice guy, Leonard’s a change, Leonard’s better for her than the status quo of the past. Except sometimes he tries to hard, and sometimes he lets his insecurities get the better of him and he gets mean, and most of the time he’s a pale impersonation of the guy she met and befriended years ago.
“I still feel that it’s better for everyone if the events of last night are just written off,” he says, in answer to her silence.
Penny laughs, though it’s not because anything about this is all that funny. “I think the beans are pretty much spilled, Sheldon. I don’t know what else you could possibly have left out.”
“Penny, you kissed me last night.”
So it gets worse, apparently. She gets this sinking feeling in her gut, just barely managing a somewhat-hopeful, “Yeah but on the cheek right?”
“I believe you called me your hero and, as I have often heard you refer to it, ‘planted one on me’.”
Her mouth goes dry.
---
“Sheldon!” Leonard finally yells, trying to snap Sheldon out of whatever funk he was in. It did nothing but make him cringe.
“He doesn’t like fighting, remember?” She replies, her voice matching Leonard’s both in volume and tone, and she realizes that’s kind of counterproductive but she isn’t at a point where she feels like she can take a deep breath and calm the hell down. She’s still angry, sort of at the both of them, and Sheldon’s vulnerabilities in this particular situation just aren’t going to erase that fact.
Leonard, of course, calls her out on this. “Well then maybe you shouldn’t be yelling.”
“Oh my god, could you be more hypocritical right now? I wasn’t the one who started this in the first place.”
“Please don’t use playground logic right now,” he says, and she tries to ignore just how much that feels like another potshot at how superior his education or logic or whatever is to hers. It translates into a glare anyway. “And you really didn’t think that this was going to come up at some point?”
“No,” she lies, because if she hadn’t thought that he’d go off the deep end about the thing with Sheldon helping her out of the shower and to get dressed, while she was naked, then she probably would’ve already told him. He could grab her boob, he could see her tattoo, it really made no difference to her. Whatever this situation was with her and Sheldon, it had jack shit to do with what he saw and way more to do with…well, him. “There was nothing to come up. I didn’t sleep with him; he just helped me.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she can see that Sheldon’s given up entirely with the dishes. Instead, his eyes are darting between her and Leonard, not really focused on either of them, and it takes a good amount of thought to determine that it’s not even them he’s looking at. It’s his escape routes, one out the front door and the other to his bedroom, and they’re currently blocking them. For whatever reason, he isn’t chancing trying to pass them right now, instead looking for an opening. If she wasn’t so pissed right now, she might laugh. She might also cry. That’s how stable her moods feel at the moment.
“Well clearly something is going on,” Leonard picks right back up again, barely a pause in between her words and his.
“Oh, how would you know?” She asks, rather stupidly because, as Leonard points out via a totally ridiculous hand gesture and a look, Sheldon wouldn’t be in the current state of relative muteness that he’s in right now if he didn’t feel like he’d done something wrong. Sheldon isn’t one to be wrongly accused. She counters with more half-truths, “He did that when it was just us fighting. It doesn’t mean anything.”
“What is wrong with you?”
”What’s wrong with me? I’m not the one acting completely irrationally. What’s wrong with you?”
“No, you’re just keeping secrets. You aren’t being honest about anything.”
“At least I’m honest with myself.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
If they had been listening to anything but the sound of their own competing voices, maybe they would’ve heard footsteps outside of the door, or the sound of someone fiddling with the doorknob.
They didn’t. And Leonard, who had been leaning against the front door he’d slammed shut at the beginning of this conversation, found himself without that door behind him as Howard and Raj opened it and he fell backwards, failing to catch himself and ending up on his ass. Howard and Raj took a step back, delayed joint reaction. Penny, too shocked to move within those first few seconds, remained in place.
Sheldon, seeing his opening, bolted straight out the front door before anyone could even comprehend what just occurred.
---
For the record, Penny had in no way intended to break up with Leonard the day he came back.
That said, she knew as soon as she woke up for the second time the morning after her little trip to the emergency room that she was going to break up with him. It didn’t directly have anything to do with Sheldon, even if it did indirectly. He’d forced her to confront the things she’d been thinking and feeling for a few weeks now. He sped up the inevitable.
The plan, because she’d bothered to think this through, from the initial deed straight through to all the possible ramifications in the future, was to pretend everything was fine the day he got back and then break it to him the next morning. She felt bad about cornering him as soon as he got home.
See, there was a plan. But plans so rarely work out.
“Hey,” Leonard surprises her from the top of the stairs just as she’s stepping out of her apartment, on the way to get her mail from downstairs. He’s got a bag in each hand but he soon abandons them against the wall, in favor of closing the space between them and capturing her lips with his own. His hands fall against her waist and she finds herself profusely thankful that he didn’t lay a hand anywhere in the vicinity of her injured shoulder which hurt like a son of a bitch. She was avoiding the pain killers.
It’s only after that initial bout of relief that she realizes that he hadn’t even noticed her injury. He’d just gone straight to the kissing, like they’d been apart for weeks instead of a few days.
That must be what does it. She pulls back, breaking the kiss somewhat prematurely, and grasping a hold of his arm with her only free hand. The shock of this, and the absence of her other hand, finally draws his attention to the sling. “Oh my god, what happened?”
“Leonard,” she blurts his name and, after a moment to evaluate what she’s about to do, she goes for broke. “I don’t think this is working.”
“What?” He’s apparently still stuck on the arm because he has to tear his gaze away from the sling back to her face. It makes her a little regretful for jumping straight into this. Not that she could turn back now.
“This. Us.” Words are failing her and it occurs to her that she never scripted this whole thing. She’d thought of reasons but not necessarily ones she was willing to vocalize, and she’d always kind of figured that she’d do it on the spot. Penny’s always found the words easily. She finds herself falling back on excuses, things she’s said before. They’re generic and not at all what she’d meant to say. “We fight all the time. We never did that when we were friends. It was always just so much easier.”
“Yeah but…I mean, couples are supposed to fight,” he starts, defensive and still like he has hope, a chance to turn this around at the eleventh hour.
“This isn’t…” she stops looking at him, her eyes finding his bags against the wall. She’d told him she had to work to avoid going on that trip. She’d lied.
This has been falling apart for awhile.
With renewed confidence, she sets her sights on him once again, locking eyes with him. “The whole thing with this was if it didn’t work we could always go back to being friends. And I like you Leonard, I really do, and I understand that this is going to hurt and you’re going to be mad for awhile, but there’s no way we’re going to make this last for much longer without ending up angry and bitter because we didn’t call it quits earlier. I want to go back to what we were. We’re better that way.”
“I don’t…” she thinks the next word is going to be understand. Maybe a synonym to it. She doesn’t let him get it out. Instead, she presses a kiss to his cheek and scampers off down four flights of stairs at a record-breaking pace.
In the lobby, she calls herself a coward and leans against the wall opposite the mailboxes for a minute to regain some sort of composure. Then she collects her mail, walks back upstairs, and locks herself in her apartment for the duration of the day.
It’s eleven at night when there’s three knocks at her door and she almost asks Sheldon to go away before she rethinks taking the chance of alienating someone else today.
She gets up from the couch to open the door, rather than just yelling at him to let himself in, and when she does, coming face to face with him, he makes no move to enter. He only says, “Leonard is asleep. He was very upset by today’s events.”
Her anger at herself transfers to anger at him in mere seconds and she leans against the doorframe with a sigh. “Thanks for the heads up Sheldon; I kind of figured that out.”
Sheldon doesn’t seem to recognize her tone or her attitude as anything outside of the norm. She doesn’t know why she expected anymore. She watches him fold his hands in front of him, watches his Adam’s apple bob as he swallows, and then, after enough time has passed that she’s wondering just what the hell he’s doing here and whether or not she can shut the door and go back to her still-warm spot on the couch, he says, “I am truly sorry if my candor yesterday morning has caused you the sort of pain that it has apparently caused Leonard. It was certainly not my intention.”
Any irritation she was feeling falls out of her body at that. Penny knows just how rare it is to have him apologize, let alone mean it as sincerely as he seems to right now, and for the second time that day she finds herself pressing a kiss to someone’s cheek, albeit this time on tiptoe. She uses his arm to balance herself, and his hand curls around her elbow, steadying her like it’s a reflex.
“Penny,” he starts, when her feet are firmly back on the ground.
“Goodnight Sheldon,” she says, stopping him before either of them can screw up the one good moment she’s had all day, and closes the door quietly.
He doesn’t knock again.
---
“I don’t understand why we have to do this,” Leonard says, his turn signal on, taking a right on Euclid Avenue. She doesn’t know where they’re going; she’s not sure he does either.
“Because he’s not going to just come back on his own.”
“How do you know?”
“Because last time he did this we had to go get him from the comic book store and buy him things just to get him to leave.”
“Well, the comic book store is closed so we won’t have to worry about that,” Leonard offers, though not in a positive tone.
“So is the Cheesecake Factory,” she adds, racking her brain for the places he might go, “and he wouldn’t go to Raj or Howard’s, since he already knows where they are. Maybe he went to work? Didn’t he like live in his office once?”
“We’ll try that next. It’s on the way.”
To where, she wants to ask but doesn’t. For a long few seconds they drive in absolute silence, the roads more or less clear and the street lights bright in the pitch black darkness. People are probably still visiting with family, finishing up dinner, having nice, normal thanksgivings that don’t end with fighting and driving around searching for your ex-boyfriend’s roommate who you might sort of have feelings for.
The silence can only last so long though. “What did you mean when you said at least you were honest with yourself?”
Penny sinks further back in her seat. This is one of those things that you say in the heat of the moment, when you’re not thinking about clarification and elaboration; you’re just thinking about what you can scream louder over the other person and still sound intelligent while doing so.
She still meant it, so she still owes him an explanation.
In the interest of avoiding another fight in such close quarters, she adopts a softer tone. “Remember all that stuff I said in the hallway? About the fighting and how we were better friends.”
She allows for a sarcastic response, something along the lines of ‘how could I forget?’, but he doesn’t make it, instead saying, “Yeah.”
“I meant all that stuff,” she prefaces, and tries to keep her eyes on those street lights rather than her hands. “But that’s not the reason I broke up with you.”
“Okay, you maybe want to share?” The car veers dangerously close to a parking lot and she sincerely hopes that he isn’t thinking of pulling into one to have this conversation.
“When we were together, you weren’t you. It was like you were so busy trying to be what you thought I wanted that you lost the part of you that I actually liked to begin with.”
He looks at her, for the briefest of seconds, not about to take his eyes off the road for too long. It unnerves her but at the same time it forces her to go on so that he doesn’t have the chance to put up a fight.
“And I thought that would go away after a while but it didn’t,” she shakes her head and switches her gaze to the window. “I think it was about fantasies. I was the hot girl next door that the geeky guy never gets, and you were just the nice guy who’s just so different from everyone I’ve ever dated. And maybe that works for some people but it wasn’t working for us. It wasn’t going to work for us, it was just going to change us, and I didn’t want to get to the point where nothing was salvageable and we couldn’t go back.”
She sighs. She hates the drawn out monologue; hates how sometimes they’re necessary.
“I didn’t want to lose you completely, you know?”
The car comes to a stop and she panics before she realizes that he’s already pulled into CalTech. He doesn’t make any move to get out.
“Leonard?” She tries because she’d really like a reaction to all of that now. Before she wasn’t sure, before she thought that maybe she’d just like to run and hide after she got it all out, to avoid the awkwardness, but now that she’s gone and actually said it she wants to be sure he gets it. It’s not that they’re bad people, it’s just that they really don’t work that way.
“I know,” he says, to the steering wheel, and something lifts within her a little.
---
One week ago, on the couch in his apartment, with Leonard out on some unknown errand, at least to her, she half turns to Sheldon and decides she’s feeling particularly brave.
“What is this?”
He gives her a mostly puzzled look, hand fumbling for the remote. “This is Doctor Who. I explained this to you earlier.”
“No, I mean…” she trails when she watches his finger hover over the pause button with some degree of annoyance. She contemplates leaning in to kiss him, just for the sake of clearing up the topic of this conversation but thinks that might just make things more unclear. This is not a good time. “Never mind.”
Penny wonders if it whatever’s between them deserves a conversation, a definition, dedicated to it. It was just one kiss, one very-drugged kiss that she couldn’t remember and that had thrown him for a loop. And she’d dumped her boyfriend. But not for Sheldon. For herself, for Leonard, for the sake of their friendship down the road.
It still added up in ways that indicated that, yes, there was a reason for this conversation. And they would have it - just maybe not now.
She gives up and shifts her eyes back to the television. After a long few seconds, he relaxes in his seat and stops looking at her.
---
Leonard leads her done one hallway and through another until they end up at Sheldon’s office. They don’t even have to knock to know that’s where he’s holed up because they can hear him rustling around inside. She shoots a glance at Leonard, trying to determine just how they’re going to do this and who’s going to say what.
She doesn’t want to know how he got here without their aid or a car that he could drive at, like, ten miles an hour.
Through some mutual unspoken decision it’s decided that she should be the one to knock, and she does, three times quietly, mimicking him to a degree in hopes that the familiarity will strike some chord within him. “Sheldon?”
All noise inside stops.
“Sweetie, we’re done fighting. We want you to come home.” On the second ‘we’ she glues her eyes to Leonard’s. They’re presenting a united front if it kills them. Not like the comic book store the last time where he didn’t do a damn thing to help. There is still nothing but silence greeting them.
Again, she looks to Leonard and when that doesn’t draw some sort of response out of him she judges him in the leg with her foot, for lack of ability to do it with her shoulder like she might normally. It’s a lot to ask but at the same time it isn’t. Sheldon’s his friend and his roommate and for all they put up with he might as well be family. “Sheldon, seriously, answer the door.”
She ups the ante then, “We’re not leaving until you at least open it.”
Without warning, the door cracks open, swinging ever so slowly and Sheldon comes into view, moving back behind his desk. There are papers and his shuffling of them seem aimless. He’s not focused. She raises an eyebrow at him and when he finally looks up at her, he motions to the by now fully open door. “The door is open. You are now free to leave.”
“No,” she says, entering and wasting no time walking over to his desk, perching herself on the edge of it so that he can’t blatantly ignore her. She’s in his personal space way too much for that. “Sheldon, people fight. All the time. You can’t run away every time.”
“Yes, in fact, I can.” He replies, not yet looking at her but very aware of her presence. “I told you I preferred to avoid having this discussion entirely a number of weeks ago, as I had a feeling it would lead to this. It did. I was right. And in the future, I would hope that you would not push me on such matters.”
“Sheldon,” she half-sighs.
“Penny,” he says, his tone even and emotionless. He’s closed up for the night.
“Sheldon, it’s Thanksgiving,” Leonard tries. When she faces him, she can tell it’s taking some amount of effort not to roll his eyes at the fact that he’s actually having this conversation. “It’s a social obligation to eat dinner and be nice and pretend like everything’s fine. It’s about being thankful for what you have and focusing on that instead of what’s wrong.”
“I never understood why you would put so much effort into something that only lasts a day.”
“Because,” Penny cuts in here, mildly impressed with Leonard’s attempt. “It’s supposed to give you a different perspective on things.”
“I don’t see what that has to do with our current situation. I don’t need a new perspective.”
It’s when she gets that maybe it isn’t him who needs one. Maybe it’s her. Maybe it’s Leonard. Maybe it’s the two of them who need to start thinking about things other than a shitty breakup and the lengths they’ve gone to avoid each other for the past two weeks. There’s the mourning period, standard at the end of all relationships, but there’s only so long that can go on before you’re just doing more damage. Maybe this is where that ends.
Without prompting, Leonard nods at her, their eyes meeting across the room. And somehow they’re back on the same page in ways they haven’t been in too long.
“We’re done, Sheldon. I swear we’re really done. No more fighting. Not tonight and not anytime soon.” She rests her free hand on Sheldon’s shoulder, tentatively, and he doesn’t shrug it off or otherwise move. “Just come home.”
---
Several hours ago, they made it through dinner peacefully but awkwardly. Her and Leonard stumbled and moved around each other carefully, but the food was good and the conversation was light and Penny had actual hope that maybe she’d done the right thing by not canceling.
Her and Leonard told stories of their own respective childhood Thanksgiving traditions, or, really, Leonard’s lack thereof, and occasionally Sheldon interjected something about his own experiences. She talked about her dad taking her hunting for a turkey, Thanksgiving spent on a farm in Nebraska, and found the first part resembled Sheldon’s own celebrations, except she was far less resistant to it, even if actually getting the turkey in the end made her sad.
It was probably what made her a sometimes vegetarian, except on special occasions or where steak is involved.
“My sister hated it. My brother thought it was brave; called her the cowardly lion until she reminded him that she still knew how to work a gun.”
Leonard smiles, something genuine, as he asks, “Is that why your tattoo says courage?”
For a moment there, she means to correct him. That’s not the reason why, although you could probably make a Hallmark story out of it. For a moment, she completely forgets that she’s had a discussion regarding her tattoo not all that long ago, and that it wasn’t with Leonard.
And then Sheldon pipes up and it all falls apart. “No, her tattoo says soup.”
“How do you know what…” Leonard trails, first looking to Sheldon, then her. Something in his eyes changes.
A switch is flipped.
“You slept with him?”
---
Several hours later, between her and Leonard, the kitchen is cleaned and everything is where it’s supposed to be, so as to avoid any minor freakouts from Sheldon in the morning.
He is asleep.
“Thanks,” she offers, when he hands her a towel for the final dish that she’s cleaning. “And not just for the dish.”
“For the…oh. Yeah.” Leonard looks down, the kind of bashful way that he used to, and fiddles with his hands. “Spirit of the holiday right?”
“Sure,” she replies, nodding and putting the glass back in the cabinet. She’d like to think that’s not all it is. “And I’m sorry this happened like this.”
“No, you were right.” He regains the ability to look her in the eye. It’s nice. “I wasn’t me. I was just waiting for the other shoe to drop.”
Penny drops her towel, relieved to hear that he understands where she’s coming from and crosses the room, enveloping him in a one-armed hug that he’s clearly not ready for. “Happy Thanksgiving,” she says, into his ear.
She thinks she’s found her new perspective.