DVD Commentary - The Hokum Hierarchy Determinator {TBBT - Sheldon/Penny}
This is the DVD Commentary version of The Hokum Hierarchy Determinator, as requested by hesperia. If you want to request commentary, please feel free to do so here.
So a little background on where the idea for this story came from. Ingrid Michaelson's 'Die Alone', which is where the lyrics for the cut tag comes from, was stuck in my head.
I woke up this morning with a funny taste in my head.
Spackled some butter over my whole grain bread.
Something tastes different, maybe it's my tongue.
Something tatstes different, suddenly I'm not so young.
I've never been someone who does 'song-fic' by defintion, however music heavily inspires me in my writing and quite often my stories get started because of a chunk of lyrics. Hence this. Those four lines gave me the entire opening paragraph, which was all I had to go on. The rest of it? I pretty much made that up as I went along. It's a miracle that I didn't get stuck on it longer than I did.
And by the way, that song works for this ship. At least it does for me.
Penny wakes up a week shy of her twenty-ninth birthday.
That is, of course, not to say she actually physically woke up. Not like she was in a coma for years and now it’s a miracle or whatever. She wakes up everyday, stumbles into the kitchen to make coffee and breakfast, stumbles to the Cheesecake Factory to make money, stumbles to auditions to inevitably make a fool out of herself, and then finally stumbles into the boys’ apartment to make herself feel better.
There are days, very, very bad days when it’s between them and the tequila or the rum or the vodka. It’s between them or alcohol burning a path down her throat to make her feel something akin to okay and like she means something to someone.
Can I just say that I use alcohol in fic way too much? I think it's all the Grey's Anatomy I watch.
She means something to them.
But no, when she says she woke up she means that she got out of bed that morning, discovered that she was out of coffee, walked across the hall into the boys’ apartment (which, by this point, was really singular, but more on that later) without knocking, and only went as far as the counter before Sheldon was handing her the coffee without a word. Then she walked out and back into her apartment.
I don't know who all has noticed, other than artincircles, but there is always coffee in my fics, and it is always used as a metaphor somewhere down the line. This is going to be one of those fics.
The coffee was brewing, the aroma permeating the air, and she was halfway to burning her toast when it struck her. It struck her that there’s no good reason for Sheldon to have coffee in his apartment. He doesn’t drink it. Leonard’s been gone for too long now.
It strikes her as odd. Then it strikes her as confusing, since she’d already pretty much figured out all of his little quirks and routines and idiosyncrasies over the past seven years and change.
That’s when she figures out it’s an adjustment made because of her. A pre-emptive strike of his, since she’s always out of one thing or another, always invading his apartment at odd times looking for coffee or milk or detergent or whatever. He anticipates her needs now, the same way she anticipates his actions and reactions, giving and taking without a single word.
It’s believable with her. Penny’s been good at adapting to circumstances for a long time now. But with Sheldon it approaches the realm of near impossibility. Sheldon doesn’t believe in change. He doesn’t take to it well when it’s forced upon him, and he sure as hell wouldn’t initiate it on his own. He never did it for Leonard, or Howard, or Raj. There’s no rhyme or reason for him to keep coffee in his apartment when the last time he drank it was one night two years ago when she had spent the night out with friends and drunk herself to a level incredibly near that of alcohol poisoning; he’d stayed awake pretty much the entire night to keep an eye on her. There’s no reason at all.
Unless.
Unless.
Penny wakes up a week shy of her twenty-ninth birthday and realizes that Sheldon Cooper has learned the previously unmasterable skill of change, of adapting, and he learned it for her and only her.
Penny wakes up a week shy of her twenty-ninth birthday and realizes just what that could mean.
I really like the idea of all of these little adjustments, like him keeping coffee in the apartment, because they're just subtle enough to be believable.
---
Yeah, I have to have exposition. Always. Sometimes too much.
When Penny was twenty-four she broke up with Leonard.
It was late June into early July and they’d been arguing over nothing and everything non-stop for a week. Sheldon took to sleeping in his office, had been for days. Howard and Bernadette, who were still together as of that point, somehow attempted to mediate for about three days before, presumably, Howard realized that he didn’t really want to be in the middle of this. Or anywhere near this.
On the second of July, Raj got drunk enough to come onto her, realize that broke some kind of guy code, and then insinuated that it was really only a matter of time with her and Leonard and always had been and made some great philosophical type claims about how, just like the alcohol and his selective muteness, people can only change so much and for so long before they revert and become who they really are.
She’d hugged him and he’d said “turn your pelvis” out loud, in time with doing it, something she was fairly sure he wasn’t aware he was actually saying outside of his head. She let go with little effort.
Hello old-school TBBT throwback. Also, I have totally been drunk enough to think outloud. It's really not conducive to a normal, non-awkward social life.
With the fireworks breaking overhead two days later, on the fourth, she’d kissed Leonard on the cheek and told him that they there were becoming people who they didn’t like and didn’t like each other. They remained friends, in that awkward, stumbling sort of way - raw for the first year or so, but better with the passing of time.
So, fun fact about me? I am rather obsessed with Fourth of July. It has nothing to do with patriotism. It has everything to do with fireworks. This is not the first or the last time that I've had it mentioned somewhere in fic. It's a thing with me.
---
When Penny was twenty-seven Leonard moved out of 4A.
There were a variety of reasons given. It was time for a change. There was a woman he was sort of seeing. He wanted to be closer to CalTech. He was weeks away from having a psychotic break if Sheldon gave one more lecture about the proper ordering of the medicine cabinet or how to correctly eat his food.
It was never about her, he made sure to say, on more than one occasion. By then, there had been so much distance between the people they were when they were dating and the people they were now that the thought hadn’t even occurred to her. If it had been about her, he would’ve been gone years ago.
So Leonard moved out and Sheldon stayed behind. There were reasons for that one too. His income had increased in the past few years and so a roommate was no longer necessary. He quite liked living on his own. He preferred to avoid that many changes in his surroundings. The apartment was situated close enough to work but also close enough to his other frequented places like the comic book store and the various restaurants they all ordered in from (because quite often they still did dinner in that apartment, because he was still there and so was she - they still had the majority, even if it was slim).
He never bothered to say whether or not it had anything to do with her at all.
Parallels. I like them. Clearly.
---
Sheldon learned to drive at a speed that was faster than ten miles per hour a month after Leonard moved out, when she decided that there was no way she was taking him to and fro for the foreseeable future, and as such had tried to gently ease him into driving every now and then.
Sheldon has to be able to drive eventually. In a few seasons, that joke will get old. That's not the only reason that's in there though. It's there A) to symbolize the fact that they're growing up in one way or another, and B) to symbolize that the dynamic between them has changed; he isn't as dependent on her and she's more dependent on him than she was, presenting a more balanced kind of relationship. At least in my head.
She’s pretty sure there were two near-fatal accidents that occurred between the first time she attempted this and the first time she watched him drive himself to work all by himself a few months later. There had been a sense of pride that had tugged at her heart that day.
Still, on her days off when her mornings are free and he’s been especially nice to her, she drives him to work. He doesn’t like to drive - it still scares him in a way that she can clearly see from the tension that works its way through his body whenever he has to - and she doesn’t mind it so much these days. In the evenings, he catches a ride back with Raj.
I got writer's block here. I think I stopped early-to-mid-December and almost never returned to it (you can thank bebitched for telling me I had to go back). What follows was written over a period of three days, starting on December 31st
Today’s going to be one of those days, she decides, after the coffee and the early morning shell-shock. She pulls on a hoodie, puts her coffee in a travel mug, and walks back into Sheldon’s apartment with her keys in hand. The presence of them dangling off her finger alerts Sheldon to this morning’s routine.
“I see,” he replies, out of his matching robe-pajamas combo by now and in clothes that, well, still resemble a colorblind four year old's wardrobe, but, clothes. His jacket is gently laid against the arm of the couch and he’s doing something to the contents of his messenger bag. Sensing that whatever it was would take more than a minute, she collapses on the couch, her back up against his jacket. He notices. His lips twitch but he manages to bite back whatever it is that he wants to say in favor of, “Leonard has asked me to inquire as to your whereabouts this coming Thursday.”
This coming Thursday is a week from now. It’s also her birthday. She connects that fairly deftly and she’d say so if Sheldon wasn’t giving her this look like he was fifteen steps ahead of her. He overestimated his ability to be sneaky. “I have the day off from work but I’ve got an audition at three.” And then, for good measure, she asks, “Why?”
One of these days, I will expand upon Penny constantly having auditions in my fic. As it is, it's background. Which needs to be rectified.
He manages to look put-off enough. “How am I supposed to know what drives Leonard to ask these things? He merely asked me to relay the question back, though I can’t imagine how he couldn’t find the time to do so himself. It isn’t as if he’s days away from making some groundbreaking findings.”
The shot at Leonard is, at least, genuine, though definitely over the top. She doesn’t push it further. “Well then tell him I’m free after five.”
And because Sheldon remembers everything that’s said, in exactly the manner it’s said, he doesn’t bother to write that down. “He would also like to know if you would mind the presence of - “
“I don’t mind,” she cuts him off, even though she knows he hates that, and crosses her arms over her chest like a petulant child. He’s talking about Leonard’s girlfriend. The one Leonard never brings around and talks about like he’s walking on eggshells. Like she’s going to flip out. Like it even bothers her. It doesn’t. At all. She might even be happy for him. What bothers her is that everyone assumes that it’s going to bother her. Penny doesn’t want it to always be that way every time he has a girlfriend or every time she has a boyfriend.
Too much time has passed for that crap.
This is a lovely little disconnect between Penny and Leonard. He doesn't really understand her. Or know her for that matter.
Sheldon’s giving her a raised eyebrow. When she sits up straight, it dislodges his jacket so that it’s some crumpled approximation of the neat fold that it was before she came in contact with it, and he notices that too. “What?”
“For someone who claims that they don’t mind, you appear to be quite uncomfortable with this particular topic.” He says, after a moment has passed and he’s finished studying her. She’d ask him how he came up with that emotion but he’d mention things like the way her whole body tensed (it had) or the slight narrowing of her eyes, the setting of her jaw. He can name correctly several more basic emotions than he used to, even if he can’t quite understand why they’re being felt.
“Not for the reasons you’re thinking, Sheldon.” She speaks before thinking that reply through and he balks.
“Now how could you possibly know what I’m thinking? That assumption is rather prone to be erroneous.”
Way to be literal. And yet totally relevant.
He’s right, she thinks. She doesn’t have a clue what he thinks about anything anymore. She thought she did once but now she’s not so sure. Now she feels a bit like she’s trying to find her way in the dark and the battery in her flashlight is running low.
The drive to CalTech is quieter than it usually is.
---
Leonard calls right before she’s about to go into work, to tell her that he’s working late and he’s fairly sure Raj and Howard are flaking in order to go hit on unsuspecting women at some club.
Until I learn to write Howard and Raj, they are also confined to the background, which is unfortunate because I love the two of them. I just haven't yet grasped the dynamic yet. It goes to show you that whether or not I like a character has nothing to do with whether I can write them (which is, perhaps, why I could write Leonard's POV before I could write Sheldon's).
She calls Sheldon’s cell on the way to the car, gets no answer, and then leaves a message in his office to let him know that she was free, even if they weren’t, so he’d still have company for dinner. She didn’t bother asking if he wanted company; he didn’t bother returning her call.
There was Thai food waiting for her when she got home, and she dropped her stuff off in her apartment and settled on the couch with her dinner, seat opposite of his but with her legs drawn up and her feet on the middle cushion. As long as she left him his cushion on his side of the couch, he didn’t much care what she did.
“You know you should really go out with them every now and then,” she says between forkfuls. He’s watching some DVR-ed documentary that he corrects every now and then but it’s clearly not all that captivating since he doesn’t pause it every time her comments require a reply. Later, he’ll check his email and do a few work-related things while she watches Project Runway and distracts him during all the commercials. It’s the way she unwinds on nights where it’s just them; the shows change but the routine doesn’t; it’s just not only his routine now.
At this point, they might as well be roommates from the way they're acting. I'm a little in love with the idea of the two of them having a routine though, because it fits with them on the show. They already have smaller-scale routines: Soft Kitty anyone?
“I’m not entirely sure which ‘them’ is in question,” he replies. His eyes are still more or less focused between his food and the television, and she understands that to mean she hasn’t piqued his interest yet. He looks right at her when he’s really listening; he looks at her like there’s no one and nothing else in the room, and the intensity of his gaze makes her nervous in a way that seems completely unreasonable.
“Howard and Raj.” He glances her way, blinks once, like he’s going to need more elaboration than that. “You know, the whole meeting people thing? You should go and do that every now and then.”
“No thank you.” He says, like he’s declining her offer to pass the salt. In fact, she’s heard more feeling in his voice in reaction to that.
“Sheldon,” she starts.
This he is prepared for. “As I do not have the constant need for companionship and socialization that you appear to, nor the need to befriend and achieve coitus with various strange women like Wolowitz and, apparently, Koothrappali do, I find myself quite content with my current level of human interaction.”
“You’re fine with the four of us?” He gives a quick nod. Without fully intending to, she starts feeling him out on the thing that’s been bugging her since this morning. “You don’t think maybe meeting, I don’t know, a woman might be a good idea. Break up all the testosterone.”
This is more meta: it would be nice to have another chick on the show. Somewhere. Or just keep Bernadette around longer than a handful of episodes. They've kind of screwed this up by all but removing Leslie Winkle, so hopefully Bernadette doesn't go the way she did.
“I have already integrated a woman in my circle of friends.” She raises an eyebrow in his direction. “You, obviously, though I thought that went without saying.”
“Yeah but don’t you ever think about, I don’t know, finding a woman to,” she doesn’t want to say date, wants to be more subtle with her line of questioning, and she struggles to find wording that he might understand, “satisfy your needs in other ways that your normal everyday friend doesn’t.”
Any other guy you could just say "wouldn't sex be a nice change of pace?" but no, not with Sheldon.
He frowns. And he is looking at her now, albeit very oddly. “I currently have no needs that warranted further satisfying. Furthermore, I’m not sure I understand why this has become a topic of conversation.” He pauses, shifts his attention back to the television for half a second before something like understanding, which usually means he in fact completely misunderstood her, crosses over his features. “I can however assure you that I am not looking for a replacement for you, if that’s what you’re asking. I find your companionship to be acceptable and occasionally enjoyable.”
He missed the point. Then again, maybe he didn’t. “Even if I don’t understand half of the things that you’re saying?”
“Penny, if that truly was a deterrent then you would not currently be sitting in my apartment, talking through the same documentary I attempted to watch last week - “
“I thought it looked familiar!”
“As I was saying, attempted to watch last week and was interrupted, also by you, which is a behavior that appears to be repeating.”
It’s her turn to frown at him. He’s saying that he wouldn’t do this for Jane Doe off the street, leaving her with several various ways to interpret the why behind that. Penny wishes that she just didn’t care enough to bother, but she does. She tries for the fake cheer and over-enthusiasm of less serious conversations. “So you’re saying I get special privileges?”
He puts the documentary on pause. Finally. “No. What I’m saying is that you observe enough of my routines that I allow very limited leeway on more trivial matters.” She feels a smile play at her lips, for whatever reason. “And again might I ask why we’re having this conversation?”
She’s pushed enough tonight that she can say “no reason” without a tinge of regret. He looks at her for a moment more, waiting for her to retract her statement, but when nothing comes he presses play again and shifts them back into normalcy, into the safety of routine.
This is pure set-up for the ending. It's also to illustrate that Penny can read between the lines TO A POINT. She's still missing some of what he's saying.
---
On Friday, she doesn’t see Sheldon at all.
She wakes after she knows he’s already gone and leaves for work before he’s back. When she gets off that night, one of her co-workers, Carla, is talking drinks with a side of possible dancing, and Penny ignores the fact that she’s tired from being on her feet for the better part of the day and goes. She changes into the clothes she’s started keeping in her car for nights like these in the Cheesecake Factory bathroom, leaves out the back, and meets up with her co-workers twenty minutes later.
I can never come up with names for friends, even though I like giving them to Penny. I will literally sit there for 10 minutes trying to find something that's good and then I STILL won't like it.
It’s after one in the morning when she stumbles back with tall, dark and hopefully handsome (she’s withholding judgment until the alcohol has worn off). Carla had all but shoved him her way before she left with his friend and he was nice enough. She liked that she didn’t tower over him in her heels. He appeared to like her ass, from the way he kept staring.
He presses her into her closed front door when they get inside, kissing her in the sort of way that clearly states his intentions, and when he pulls back she tells him that she’ll be right back and heads into her bedroom in an attempt to clear off the mess of clothing on her bed from this morning.
When she comes back, an incredibly short time later, he’s passed out drunk on her couch, and she figures it’s just as well.
I'm not really sure why they didn't have sex. I do know that I deleted this entire section at least three times because I couldn't get it just right and I'm still not all that pleased with it.
She thinks she hears a noise outside her door, for a moment, as she’s standing in the doorway trying to decide whether or not to just leave him there, but by the time she’s turned on her heel and headed to bed she’s managed to convince herself that it was nothing at all.
Clearly, it was not nothing.
---
Saturday morning, she hands tall, dark and actually handsome coffee, and manages to learn and remember his name, which is Greg.
Penny thinks that she might have met him before, somewhere, but can’t place him. She doesn’t ask either.
He leaves before the awkwardness can truly begin, out the door by nine-thirty, and not long after that she pulls herself together enough to consider leaving her apartment. She replaced the coffee on Thursday but now she finds herself in need of shampoo which means a trip to the grocery store is not only inevitable but also fairly urgent.
The mistake comes in the form of the quick knock on the door to 4A, a second’s warning before she opens the door open, standing there rather unceremoniously as she coils her hair in a messy bun without the aid of a mirror. Sheldon’s at his computer. She leans her hip against the doorway and says, “I’m going to the store. Do you need anything while you’re there?”
“No. But thank you for asking.” He replies. Usually there’s a hint of a smile at the corner of his lips, almost like he’s proud of himself for remembering to add that last part. It’s absent now and she finds herself waiting a few seconds for it to appear, watching his face, slightly tinted blue from the reflection of the computer screen.
It doesn’t. She straightens. “Okay. I’ll see you later.”
The door is closing behind her when he asks, “I assume your visitor is gone for the day?”
It’s not an unusual question. Every time she has a new boyfriend, a new fling, a new one night stand, he asks. It affects him, somehow, in a similar way to when Leonard would have a new girlfriend. It’s not the same - she’s not his roommate, just his neighbor - but she’s the one he spends the most time with and so if her time is about to be split or cause him any sort of inconvenience he likes to know about it. Part of her plays it off as a simple inquiry into her life, his makeshift small talk, because it makes her feel better and him look better.
The unusual thing here is found in the context. She notices the difference because she noticed the noise outside of her door last night. She notices the difference because she notices the lack of that smile moments ago. She notices the difference because she’s done her share of cataloguing his expressions and his mannerisms just like he’s done with her.
It’s all in the name of understanding. She may be the socially adept one here but that doesn’t make him one tough cookie to crack; he may be the genius but that doesn’t mean he’s not immune to flaws and areas of insufficient data and knowledge.
Like I said, balance. They balance each other with their individual strengths and flaws.
When he asks, there’s something that strikes her as undeniably wrong with his tone and she can’t put her finger on just what.
“Yeah,” she says, keeps her eyes on him. Nothing changes in his expression. She rewrites history and keeps on trying to gauge a reaction. “He was drunk and I let him crash at my place.”
“Well that was very generous of you, if ill-advised.” He looks away then, sharply, shifting his focus back to the screen; his level of interest gone from sixty to zero now, reversed. She stays in the doorway, feeling like the conversation is unfinished despite the fact that he seems to be done with it. He verbalizes that seconds later with, “I thought you said you were going to the store.”
“Yeah,” she confirms, holding his gaze. Penny wants him to say something more on the matter, to ask her questions, to admit that something is off here and that he feels it too. She’s confused and she wants to go back to the day before she had her little coffee-fueled revelation of sorts. But he doesn’t say anything and he’ll probably never say anything and so she shakes her head and says, “yeah” once more.
Like I said, the coffee metaphor is back.
She closes the door with slightly more force than necessary. She hopes he notices that. She hopes he finds that somewhere in his catalogue of her emotions and behaviors, under frustration and irrational anger. She hopes he notices that something’s wrong and she feels like her universe is half-cocked right now.
Penny just doesn’t fully believe that he can see outside of himself far enough to notice, and even if he did she isn’t sure he’s come far enough to understand why.
---
It occurs to her, at some point in the day, that not showing up to do her laundry at exactly eight-fifteen might strike him as enough of a departure from the norm to get him at her door and asking.
Except she’s got clothes to wash, lots of them, and it’s become just as instinctual for her as it is for him. She entertains the idea yet finds herself on the stairs with a basket full of dirty laundry at eight-eleven and she figures it would be far too risky and stupid to turn around now, taking a chance that she’d just run into him outside of her apartment and have to come up with some half-ass explanation.
So she throws her stuff into two of the washers, separating better than she used to thanks to constant nagging from him, and sits on top of a third with the script for her audition on Thursday. It’s a long shot but she wants to do her best, even with limited material. It’s a few lines, nothing spectacular and relying on her personality and enthusiasm hasn’t really gotten her very far as of yet.
He’s there at eight-fifteen on the dot; two minutes late according to her watch which is two minutes fast anyway if you ask him.
Hello, metaphor for their entire relationship.
“Hello, Penny,” he says, the same way he always does, depositing his pre-separated piles of clothes into the same washers they always go into. She spies his dryer sheets and realizes that she forgot her own. Then she sees him looking at her and realizes she never returned the greeting.
“Hey yourself,” she replies, trying for nonchalant but failing due to that too-long pause. “You’re late,” she adds, for lack of anything else. They’ve been over this before.
“I’m never late,” he bristles, at the same time as he walks towards her, or technically in her general direction.
She’s sitting on the washer next to the one that he does his brights in, which, let’s face it, is most of his wardrobe. Up until now she’s been dangling her flip-flop covered feet, kicking them back and forth ever so slightly, and she doesn’t stop until she feels her foot collide with his pants-leg, the muscle and bone underneath it. He does not jolt; his hand remains perfectly steady as he pours detergent into the clear plastic cup and dumps it into the washer machine. She sighs.
It's the little things with them, it really is. The amount of contact between them here is really rather unremarkable and yet this is Sheldon who doesn't like to be touched and he's just...standing there. He isn't surprised and he isn't uncomfortable. But he is aware of it and that's what's important. This is very much a story about slow, slow progression.
“I feel the need to apologize for my behavior this morning,” he starts, only after he’s closed the lid on the machine, screwing the cap back on the detergent. “As my morning was not off to a good start I’m sure you found my tone unpleasant and my level of patience even less than normal.”
Yeah, she’d noticed. She leans forward, imperceptibly, hoping that this meant he had sensed her frustration this morning. Maybe she hadn’t given him enough credit.
“However, I promise you that it had nothing at all to do with you. Unless you somehow control laser usage at CalTech. And I highly doubt that you do.”
Then again, maybe she’d given him too much. The change in tone, the lack of a smile, all of it was unrelated. She’d probably imagined that noise outside of her door. Her late night visitor hadn’t fazed him at all and it wasn’t a direct annoyance to him because he didn’t have any feelings towards her in that way.
And she was just a fool who read too much into the presence of coffee in his apartment.
She pulls her foot back, abruptly, so that no part of her is touching him, and then looks away.
(It’s important to note here that, if she was looking, she would’ve seen him flinch at the loss. But she wasn’t and she didn’t.)
The narrator pops up every now and then, completely out of nowhere. It's important that you see things like this, and it's impossible to show it to the reader through Penny's POV without writing a different sort of story. This is purely about at Sheldon, in that sentence.
---
The next morning she calls Leonard on impulse.
She needs something else to obsess over, something else to solve, and his number is up.
“We’re doing dinner tonight right?” She starts, without a preface. It isn’t too early and there’s no noise on the other end; she probably isn’t catching him in the middle of something.
“Yeah,” Leonard drags the word out, like he knows this isn’t just her calling to check and make sure. She has Sheldon for that, after all.
“So I was thinking since Howard and Raj are ditching us,” she in fact has no idea what Howard and Raj are doing, just that they won’t be able to make it - for all she knows they’re having dinner with Howard’s mother (somewhat likely), or engaging in a particularly unfortunate threesome (highly unlikely) - “maybe you should bring Michelle.”
Can I just LOL at the mental image of Howard/Raj/OFC threesome. Thanks.
He starts to protest. She already expects this. “I don’t know if that’s such a good - “
“Leonard.” Penny effectively silences him with just his name. “Bring her. Don’t you think it’ll be a little weird if she shows up at my birthday and I’ve only ever met her once?”
“Well, technically you’ve met her twice.” She waits for him to catch up with the full weight of her sentence, after she realizes what she’s gone and screwed up. “Remember, we were at the - hey, how do you know she’s going to show up at your birthday? How do you know there’s going to be anything to show up to?”
“Because you told Sheldon and he’s really shitty at subtlety and secret keeping.” All of it’s the truth. She highly doubts Sheldon was specifically told to inquire about whether or not having Leonard’s girlfriend there would bother her; instead she’s fairly sure Leonard directed him to feel her out on the subject and he didn’t understand how that was different from actually asking. “It’s not a big deal. I think it’s sweet.”
“Yeah, well,” her words make him stumble over his own like always, easily turning him into the same unconfident geek with his hands shoved into his pockets that he was the day she first met him. “I just thought since you were big on birthdays that maybe it would be a good idea. It just works better if it was surprised.”
That part where he reverts to basically S1 Leonard? Yeah, problem number dos. They don't grow around each other; they just exist.
“I can pretend to be surprised.” After all, she is an actress. Or at least she’s trying to be.
“You may not have to act.” He sounds happy all of a sudden, like he just realized that he might still have tricks left up his sleeve. “You don’t know what we’ve got planned.”
She smiles, soft, even if he can’t see it. “Whatever you say. Just…bring her tonight. It’ll be nice and we might as well get her as used to Sheldon as possible. The shock wears off after the first five times or so; might as well get that over with.”
“Okay. I’ll see you tonight.”
She hangs up and lets herself in across the hall.
Sheldon takes one look at her as she enters, then nods. “As I sense we’re about to get into a discussion regarding social conventions and my not following them, as you so often like to, might I suggest that you are currently in the habit of regularly violating one.” Penny stares at him. Quickly, he clarifies, “I believe it’s called knocking.”
There’s a beat before she throws a half-hearted “right” his way, like she’s actually about to start doing that again. Some days she knocks, some days she doesn’t. It’s mood, and topic, dependent. “So I talked to Leonard about tonight and he’s bringing Michelle with him.”
He sits there and waits for her to continue. When she doesn’t, he prompts, “I’m not sure what part of that statement I’m supposed to reply to or in what form.”
“A nice ‘okay’ would work.”
“Oh. Okay.”
You know that tone. I mean really.
She rolls her eyes. “I’m just giving you a heads up so that maybe you’ll refrain from, you know, nagging her incessantly about how she chooses to eat her food or mock her when she doesn’t get some comic book reference.”
“Actually, Michelle is quite competent in regards to the latter.”
Well, that’s one thing working in the favor of her and Leonard having some sort of successful relationship. She’s also an astrophysicist. So there’s that. Penny straightens a little and rests one hand on the doorknob. “Great. Anyways, I’ll see you later.”
“Promptly at seven.”
Her smile is tight. She knows. “Promptly at seven.”
---
(Part Two)
So a little background on where the idea for this story came from. Ingrid Michaelson's 'Die Alone', which is where the lyrics for the cut tag comes from, was stuck in my head.
I woke up this morning with a funny taste in my head.
Spackled some butter over my whole grain bread.
Something tastes different, maybe it's my tongue.
Something tatstes different, suddenly I'm not so young.
I've never been someone who does 'song-fic' by defintion, however music heavily inspires me in my writing and quite often my stories get started because of a chunk of lyrics. Hence this. Those four lines gave me the entire opening paragraph, which was all I had to go on. The rest of it? I pretty much made that up as I went along. It's a miracle that I didn't get stuck on it longer than I did.
And by the way, that song works for this ship. At least it does for me.
Penny wakes up a week shy of her twenty-ninth birthday.
That is, of course, not to say she actually physically woke up. Not like she was in a coma for years and now it’s a miracle or whatever. She wakes up everyday, stumbles into the kitchen to make coffee and breakfast, stumbles to the Cheesecake Factory to make money, stumbles to auditions to inevitably make a fool out of herself, and then finally stumbles into the boys’ apartment to make herself feel better.
There are days, very, very bad days when it’s between them and the tequila or the rum or the vodka. It’s between them or alcohol burning a path down her throat to make her feel something akin to okay and like she means something to someone.
Can I just say that I use alcohol in fic way too much? I think it's all the Grey's Anatomy I watch.
She means something to them.
But no, when she says she woke up she means that she got out of bed that morning, discovered that she was out of coffee, walked across the hall into the boys’ apartment (which, by this point, was really singular, but more on that later) without knocking, and only went as far as the counter before Sheldon was handing her the coffee without a word. Then she walked out and back into her apartment.
I don't know who all has noticed, other than artincircles, but there is always coffee in my fics, and it is always used as a metaphor somewhere down the line. This is going to be one of those fics.
The coffee was brewing, the aroma permeating the air, and she was halfway to burning her toast when it struck her. It struck her that there’s no good reason for Sheldon to have coffee in his apartment. He doesn’t drink it. Leonard’s been gone for too long now.
It strikes her as odd. Then it strikes her as confusing, since she’d already pretty much figured out all of his little quirks and routines and idiosyncrasies over the past seven years and change.
That’s when she figures out it’s an adjustment made because of her. A pre-emptive strike of his, since she’s always out of one thing or another, always invading his apartment at odd times looking for coffee or milk or detergent or whatever. He anticipates her needs now, the same way she anticipates his actions and reactions, giving and taking without a single word.
It’s believable with her. Penny’s been good at adapting to circumstances for a long time now. But with Sheldon it approaches the realm of near impossibility. Sheldon doesn’t believe in change. He doesn’t take to it well when it’s forced upon him, and he sure as hell wouldn’t initiate it on his own. He never did it for Leonard, or Howard, or Raj. There’s no rhyme or reason for him to keep coffee in his apartment when the last time he drank it was one night two years ago when she had spent the night out with friends and drunk herself to a level incredibly near that of alcohol poisoning; he’d stayed awake pretty much the entire night to keep an eye on her. There’s no reason at all.
Unless.
Unless.
Penny wakes up a week shy of her twenty-ninth birthday and realizes that Sheldon Cooper has learned the previously unmasterable skill of change, of adapting, and he learned it for her and only her.
Penny wakes up a week shy of her twenty-ninth birthday and realizes just what that could mean.
I really like the idea of all of these little adjustments, like him keeping coffee in the apartment, because they're just subtle enough to be believable.
---
Yeah, I have to have exposition. Always. Sometimes too much.
When Penny was twenty-four she broke up with Leonard.
It was late June into early July and they’d been arguing over nothing and everything non-stop for a week. Sheldon took to sleeping in his office, had been for days. Howard and Bernadette, who were still together as of that point, somehow attempted to mediate for about three days before, presumably, Howard realized that he didn’t really want to be in the middle of this. Or anywhere near this.
On the second of July, Raj got drunk enough to come onto her, realize that broke some kind of guy code, and then insinuated that it was really only a matter of time with her and Leonard and always had been and made some great philosophical type claims about how, just like the alcohol and his selective muteness, people can only change so much and for so long before they revert and become who they really are.
She’d hugged him and he’d said “turn your pelvis” out loud, in time with doing it, something she was fairly sure he wasn’t aware he was actually saying outside of his head. She let go with little effort.
Hello old-school TBBT throwback. Also, I have totally been drunk enough to think outloud. It's really not conducive to a normal, non-awkward social life.
With the fireworks breaking overhead two days later, on the fourth, she’d kissed Leonard on the cheek and told him that they there were becoming people who they didn’t like and didn’t like each other. They remained friends, in that awkward, stumbling sort of way - raw for the first year or so, but better with the passing of time.
So, fun fact about me? I am rather obsessed with Fourth of July. It has nothing to do with patriotism. It has everything to do with fireworks. This is not the first or the last time that I've had it mentioned somewhere in fic. It's a thing with me.
---
When Penny was twenty-seven Leonard moved out of 4A.
There were a variety of reasons given. It was time for a change. There was a woman he was sort of seeing. He wanted to be closer to CalTech. He was weeks away from having a psychotic break if Sheldon gave one more lecture about the proper ordering of the medicine cabinet or how to correctly eat his food.
It was never about her, he made sure to say, on more than one occasion. By then, there had been so much distance between the people they were when they were dating and the people they were now that the thought hadn’t even occurred to her. If it had been about her, he would’ve been gone years ago.
So Leonard moved out and Sheldon stayed behind. There were reasons for that one too. His income had increased in the past few years and so a roommate was no longer necessary. He quite liked living on his own. He preferred to avoid that many changes in his surroundings. The apartment was situated close enough to work but also close enough to his other frequented places like the comic book store and the various restaurants they all ordered in from (because quite often they still did dinner in that apartment, because he was still there and so was she - they still had the majority, even if it was slim).
He never bothered to say whether or not it had anything to do with her at all.
Parallels. I like them. Clearly.
---
Sheldon learned to drive at a speed that was faster than ten miles per hour a month after Leonard moved out, when she decided that there was no way she was taking him to and fro for the foreseeable future, and as such had tried to gently ease him into driving every now and then.
Sheldon has to be able to drive eventually. In a few seasons, that joke will get old. That's not the only reason that's in there though. It's there A) to symbolize the fact that they're growing up in one way or another, and B) to symbolize that the dynamic between them has changed; he isn't as dependent on her and she's more dependent on him than she was, presenting a more balanced kind of relationship. At least in my head.
She’s pretty sure there were two near-fatal accidents that occurred between the first time she attempted this and the first time she watched him drive himself to work all by himself a few months later. There had been a sense of pride that had tugged at her heart that day.
Still, on her days off when her mornings are free and he’s been especially nice to her, she drives him to work. He doesn’t like to drive - it still scares him in a way that she can clearly see from the tension that works its way through his body whenever he has to - and she doesn’t mind it so much these days. In the evenings, he catches a ride back with Raj.
I got writer's block here. I think I stopped early-to-mid-December and almost never returned to it (you can thank bebitched for telling me I had to go back). What follows was written over a period of three days, starting on December 31st
Today’s going to be one of those days, she decides, after the coffee and the early morning shell-shock. She pulls on a hoodie, puts her coffee in a travel mug, and walks back into Sheldon’s apartment with her keys in hand. The presence of them dangling off her finger alerts Sheldon to this morning’s routine.
“I see,” he replies, out of his matching robe-pajamas combo by now and in clothes that, well, still resemble a colorblind four year old's wardrobe, but, clothes. His jacket is gently laid against the arm of the couch and he’s doing something to the contents of his messenger bag. Sensing that whatever it was would take more than a minute, she collapses on the couch, her back up against his jacket. He notices. His lips twitch but he manages to bite back whatever it is that he wants to say in favor of, “Leonard has asked me to inquire as to your whereabouts this coming Thursday.”
This coming Thursday is a week from now. It’s also her birthday. She connects that fairly deftly and she’d say so if Sheldon wasn’t giving her this look like he was fifteen steps ahead of her. He overestimated his ability to be sneaky. “I have the day off from work but I’ve got an audition at three.” And then, for good measure, she asks, “Why?”
One of these days, I will expand upon Penny constantly having auditions in my fic. As it is, it's background. Which needs to be rectified.
He manages to look put-off enough. “How am I supposed to know what drives Leonard to ask these things? He merely asked me to relay the question back, though I can’t imagine how he couldn’t find the time to do so himself. It isn’t as if he’s days away from making some groundbreaking findings.”
The shot at Leonard is, at least, genuine, though definitely over the top. She doesn’t push it further. “Well then tell him I’m free after five.”
And because Sheldon remembers everything that’s said, in exactly the manner it’s said, he doesn’t bother to write that down. “He would also like to know if you would mind the presence of - “
“I don’t mind,” she cuts him off, even though she knows he hates that, and crosses her arms over her chest like a petulant child. He’s talking about Leonard’s girlfriend. The one Leonard never brings around and talks about like he’s walking on eggshells. Like she’s going to flip out. Like it even bothers her. It doesn’t. At all. She might even be happy for him. What bothers her is that everyone assumes that it’s going to bother her. Penny doesn’t want it to always be that way every time he has a girlfriend or every time she has a boyfriend.
Too much time has passed for that crap.
This is a lovely little disconnect between Penny and Leonard. He doesn't really understand her. Or know her for that matter.
Sheldon’s giving her a raised eyebrow. When she sits up straight, it dislodges his jacket so that it’s some crumpled approximation of the neat fold that it was before she came in contact with it, and he notices that too. “What?”
“For someone who claims that they don’t mind, you appear to be quite uncomfortable with this particular topic.” He says, after a moment has passed and he’s finished studying her. She’d ask him how he came up with that emotion but he’d mention things like the way her whole body tensed (it had) or the slight narrowing of her eyes, the setting of her jaw. He can name correctly several more basic emotions than he used to, even if he can’t quite understand why they’re being felt.
“Not for the reasons you’re thinking, Sheldon.” She speaks before thinking that reply through and he balks.
“Now how could you possibly know what I’m thinking? That assumption is rather prone to be erroneous.”
Way to be literal. And yet totally relevant.
He’s right, she thinks. She doesn’t have a clue what he thinks about anything anymore. She thought she did once but now she’s not so sure. Now she feels a bit like she’s trying to find her way in the dark and the battery in her flashlight is running low.
The drive to CalTech is quieter than it usually is.
---
Leonard calls right before she’s about to go into work, to tell her that he’s working late and he’s fairly sure Raj and Howard are flaking in order to go hit on unsuspecting women at some club.
Until I learn to write Howard and Raj, they are also confined to the background, which is unfortunate because I love the two of them. I just haven't yet grasped the dynamic yet. It goes to show you that whether or not I like a character has nothing to do with whether I can write them (which is, perhaps, why I could write Leonard's POV before I could write Sheldon's).
She calls Sheldon’s cell on the way to the car, gets no answer, and then leaves a message in his office to let him know that she was free, even if they weren’t, so he’d still have company for dinner. She didn’t bother asking if he wanted company; he didn’t bother returning her call.
There was Thai food waiting for her when she got home, and she dropped her stuff off in her apartment and settled on the couch with her dinner, seat opposite of his but with her legs drawn up and her feet on the middle cushion. As long as she left him his cushion on his side of the couch, he didn’t much care what she did.
“You know you should really go out with them every now and then,” she says between forkfuls. He’s watching some DVR-ed documentary that he corrects every now and then but it’s clearly not all that captivating since he doesn’t pause it every time her comments require a reply. Later, he’ll check his email and do a few work-related things while she watches Project Runway and distracts him during all the commercials. It’s the way she unwinds on nights where it’s just them; the shows change but the routine doesn’t; it’s just not only his routine now.
At this point, they might as well be roommates from the way they're acting. I'm a little in love with the idea of the two of them having a routine though, because it fits with them on the show. They already have smaller-scale routines: Soft Kitty anyone?
“I’m not entirely sure which ‘them’ is in question,” he replies. His eyes are still more or less focused between his food and the television, and she understands that to mean she hasn’t piqued his interest yet. He looks right at her when he’s really listening; he looks at her like there’s no one and nothing else in the room, and the intensity of his gaze makes her nervous in a way that seems completely unreasonable.
“Howard and Raj.” He glances her way, blinks once, like he’s going to need more elaboration than that. “You know, the whole meeting people thing? You should go and do that every now and then.”
“No thank you.” He says, like he’s declining her offer to pass the salt. In fact, she’s heard more feeling in his voice in reaction to that.
“Sheldon,” she starts.
This he is prepared for. “As I do not have the constant need for companionship and socialization that you appear to, nor the need to befriend and achieve coitus with various strange women like Wolowitz and, apparently, Koothrappali do, I find myself quite content with my current level of human interaction.”
“You’re fine with the four of us?” He gives a quick nod. Without fully intending to, she starts feeling him out on the thing that’s been bugging her since this morning. “You don’t think maybe meeting, I don’t know, a woman might be a good idea. Break up all the testosterone.”
This is more meta: it would be nice to have another chick on the show. Somewhere. Or just keep Bernadette around longer than a handful of episodes. They've kind of screwed this up by all but removing Leslie Winkle, so hopefully Bernadette doesn't go the way she did.
“I have already integrated a woman in my circle of friends.” She raises an eyebrow in his direction. “You, obviously, though I thought that went without saying.”
“Yeah but don’t you ever think about, I don’t know, finding a woman to,” she doesn’t want to say date, wants to be more subtle with her line of questioning, and she struggles to find wording that he might understand, “satisfy your needs in other ways that your normal everyday friend doesn’t.”
Any other guy you could just say "wouldn't sex be a nice change of pace?" but no, not with Sheldon.
He frowns. And he is looking at her now, albeit very oddly. “I currently have no needs that warranted further satisfying. Furthermore, I’m not sure I understand why this has become a topic of conversation.” He pauses, shifts his attention back to the television for half a second before something like understanding, which usually means he in fact completely misunderstood her, crosses over his features. “I can however assure you that I am not looking for a replacement for you, if that’s what you’re asking. I find your companionship to be acceptable and occasionally enjoyable.”
He missed the point. Then again, maybe he didn’t. “Even if I don’t understand half of the things that you’re saying?”
“Penny, if that truly was a deterrent then you would not currently be sitting in my apartment, talking through the same documentary I attempted to watch last week - “
“I thought it looked familiar!”
“As I was saying, attempted to watch last week and was interrupted, also by you, which is a behavior that appears to be repeating.”
It’s her turn to frown at him. He’s saying that he wouldn’t do this for Jane Doe off the street, leaving her with several various ways to interpret the why behind that. Penny wishes that she just didn’t care enough to bother, but she does. She tries for the fake cheer and over-enthusiasm of less serious conversations. “So you’re saying I get special privileges?”
He puts the documentary on pause. Finally. “No. What I’m saying is that you observe enough of my routines that I allow very limited leeway on more trivial matters.” She feels a smile play at her lips, for whatever reason. “And again might I ask why we’re having this conversation?”
She’s pushed enough tonight that she can say “no reason” without a tinge of regret. He looks at her for a moment more, waiting for her to retract her statement, but when nothing comes he presses play again and shifts them back into normalcy, into the safety of routine.
This is pure set-up for the ending. It's also to illustrate that Penny can read between the lines TO A POINT. She's still missing some of what he's saying.
---
On Friday, she doesn’t see Sheldon at all.
She wakes after she knows he’s already gone and leaves for work before he’s back. When she gets off that night, one of her co-workers, Carla, is talking drinks with a side of possible dancing, and Penny ignores the fact that she’s tired from being on her feet for the better part of the day and goes. She changes into the clothes she’s started keeping in her car for nights like these in the Cheesecake Factory bathroom, leaves out the back, and meets up with her co-workers twenty minutes later.
I can never come up with names for friends, even though I like giving them to Penny. I will literally sit there for 10 minutes trying to find something that's good and then I STILL won't like it.
It’s after one in the morning when she stumbles back with tall, dark and hopefully handsome (she’s withholding judgment until the alcohol has worn off). Carla had all but shoved him her way before she left with his friend and he was nice enough. She liked that she didn’t tower over him in her heels. He appeared to like her ass, from the way he kept staring.
He presses her into her closed front door when they get inside, kissing her in the sort of way that clearly states his intentions, and when he pulls back she tells him that she’ll be right back and heads into her bedroom in an attempt to clear off the mess of clothing on her bed from this morning.
When she comes back, an incredibly short time later, he’s passed out drunk on her couch, and she figures it’s just as well.
I'm not really sure why they didn't have sex. I do know that I deleted this entire section at least three times because I couldn't get it just right and I'm still not all that pleased with it.
She thinks she hears a noise outside her door, for a moment, as she’s standing in the doorway trying to decide whether or not to just leave him there, but by the time she’s turned on her heel and headed to bed she’s managed to convince herself that it was nothing at all.
Clearly, it was not nothing.
---
Saturday morning, she hands tall, dark and actually handsome coffee, and manages to learn and remember his name, which is Greg.
Penny thinks that she might have met him before, somewhere, but can’t place him. She doesn’t ask either.
He leaves before the awkwardness can truly begin, out the door by nine-thirty, and not long after that she pulls herself together enough to consider leaving her apartment. She replaced the coffee on Thursday but now she finds herself in need of shampoo which means a trip to the grocery store is not only inevitable but also fairly urgent.
The mistake comes in the form of the quick knock on the door to 4A, a second’s warning before she opens the door open, standing there rather unceremoniously as she coils her hair in a messy bun without the aid of a mirror. Sheldon’s at his computer. She leans her hip against the doorway and says, “I’m going to the store. Do you need anything while you’re there?”
“No. But thank you for asking.” He replies. Usually there’s a hint of a smile at the corner of his lips, almost like he’s proud of himself for remembering to add that last part. It’s absent now and she finds herself waiting a few seconds for it to appear, watching his face, slightly tinted blue from the reflection of the computer screen.
It doesn’t. She straightens. “Okay. I’ll see you later.”
The door is closing behind her when he asks, “I assume your visitor is gone for the day?”
It’s not an unusual question. Every time she has a new boyfriend, a new fling, a new one night stand, he asks. It affects him, somehow, in a similar way to when Leonard would have a new girlfriend. It’s not the same - she’s not his roommate, just his neighbor - but she’s the one he spends the most time with and so if her time is about to be split or cause him any sort of inconvenience he likes to know about it. Part of her plays it off as a simple inquiry into her life, his makeshift small talk, because it makes her feel better and him look better.
The unusual thing here is found in the context. She notices the difference because she noticed the noise outside of her door last night. She notices the difference because she notices the lack of that smile moments ago. She notices the difference because she’s done her share of cataloguing his expressions and his mannerisms just like he’s done with her.
It’s all in the name of understanding. She may be the socially adept one here but that doesn’t make him one tough cookie to crack; he may be the genius but that doesn’t mean he’s not immune to flaws and areas of insufficient data and knowledge.
Like I said, balance. They balance each other with their individual strengths and flaws.
When he asks, there’s something that strikes her as undeniably wrong with his tone and she can’t put her finger on just what.
“Yeah,” she says, keeps her eyes on him. Nothing changes in his expression. She rewrites history and keeps on trying to gauge a reaction. “He was drunk and I let him crash at my place.”
“Well that was very generous of you, if ill-advised.” He looks away then, sharply, shifting his focus back to the screen; his level of interest gone from sixty to zero now, reversed. She stays in the doorway, feeling like the conversation is unfinished despite the fact that he seems to be done with it. He verbalizes that seconds later with, “I thought you said you were going to the store.”
“Yeah,” she confirms, holding his gaze. Penny wants him to say something more on the matter, to ask her questions, to admit that something is off here and that he feels it too. She’s confused and she wants to go back to the day before she had her little coffee-fueled revelation of sorts. But he doesn’t say anything and he’ll probably never say anything and so she shakes her head and says, “yeah” once more.
Like I said, the coffee metaphor is back.
She closes the door with slightly more force than necessary. She hopes he notices that. She hopes he finds that somewhere in his catalogue of her emotions and behaviors, under frustration and irrational anger. She hopes he notices that something’s wrong and she feels like her universe is half-cocked right now.
Penny just doesn’t fully believe that he can see outside of himself far enough to notice, and even if he did she isn’t sure he’s come far enough to understand why.
---
It occurs to her, at some point in the day, that not showing up to do her laundry at exactly eight-fifteen might strike him as enough of a departure from the norm to get him at her door and asking.
Except she’s got clothes to wash, lots of them, and it’s become just as instinctual for her as it is for him. She entertains the idea yet finds herself on the stairs with a basket full of dirty laundry at eight-eleven and she figures it would be far too risky and stupid to turn around now, taking a chance that she’d just run into him outside of her apartment and have to come up with some half-ass explanation.
So she throws her stuff into two of the washers, separating better than she used to thanks to constant nagging from him, and sits on top of a third with the script for her audition on Thursday. It’s a long shot but she wants to do her best, even with limited material. It’s a few lines, nothing spectacular and relying on her personality and enthusiasm hasn’t really gotten her very far as of yet.
He’s there at eight-fifteen on the dot; two minutes late according to her watch which is two minutes fast anyway if you ask him.
Hello, metaphor for their entire relationship.
“Hello, Penny,” he says, the same way he always does, depositing his pre-separated piles of clothes into the same washers they always go into. She spies his dryer sheets and realizes that she forgot her own. Then she sees him looking at her and realizes she never returned the greeting.
“Hey yourself,” she replies, trying for nonchalant but failing due to that too-long pause. “You’re late,” she adds, for lack of anything else. They’ve been over this before.
“I’m never late,” he bristles, at the same time as he walks towards her, or technically in her general direction.
She’s sitting on the washer next to the one that he does his brights in, which, let’s face it, is most of his wardrobe. Up until now she’s been dangling her flip-flop covered feet, kicking them back and forth ever so slightly, and she doesn’t stop until she feels her foot collide with his pants-leg, the muscle and bone underneath it. He does not jolt; his hand remains perfectly steady as he pours detergent into the clear plastic cup and dumps it into the washer machine. She sighs.
It's the little things with them, it really is. The amount of contact between them here is really rather unremarkable and yet this is Sheldon who doesn't like to be touched and he's just...standing there. He isn't surprised and he isn't uncomfortable. But he is aware of it and that's what's important. This is very much a story about slow, slow progression.
“I feel the need to apologize for my behavior this morning,” he starts, only after he’s closed the lid on the machine, screwing the cap back on the detergent. “As my morning was not off to a good start I’m sure you found my tone unpleasant and my level of patience even less than normal.”
Yeah, she’d noticed. She leans forward, imperceptibly, hoping that this meant he had sensed her frustration this morning. Maybe she hadn’t given him enough credit.
“However, I promise you that it had nothing at all to do with you. Unless you somehow control laser usage at CalTech. And I highly doubt that you do.”
Then again, maybe she’d given him too much. The change in tone, the lack of a smile, all of it was unrelated. She’d probably imagined that noise outside of her door. Her late night visitor hadn’t fazed him at all and it wasn’t a direct annoyance to him because he didn’t have any feelings towards her in that way.
And she was just a fool who read too much into the presence of coffee in his apartment.
She pulls her foot back, abruptly, so that no part of her is touching him, and then looks away.
(It’s important to note here that, if she was looking, she would’ve seen him flinch at the loss. But she wasn’t and she didn’t.)
The narrator pops up every now and then, completely out of nowhere. It's important that you see things like this, and it's impossible to show it to the reader through Penny's POV without writing a different sort of story. This is purely about at Sheldon, in that sentence.
---
The next morning she calls Leonard on impulse.
She needs something else to obsess over, something else to solve, and his number is up.
“We’re doing dinner tonight right?” She starts, without a preface. It isn’t too early and there’s no noise on the other end; she probably isn’t catching him in the middle of something.
“Yeah,” Leonard drags the word out, like he knows this isn’t just her calling to check and make sure. She has Sheldon for that, after all.
“So I was thinking since Howard and Raj are ditching us,” she in fact has no idea what Howard and Raj are doing, just that they won’t be able to make it - for all she knows they’re having dinner with Howard’s mother (somewhat likely), or engaging in a particularly unfortunate threesome (highly unlikely) - “maybe you should bring Michelle.”
Can I just LOL at the mental image of Howard/Raj/OFC threesome. Thanks.
He starts to protest. She already expects this. “I don’t know if that’s such a good - “
“Leonard.” Penny effectively silences him with just his name. “Bring her. Don’t you think it’ll be a little weird if she shows up at my birthday and I’ve only ever met her once?”
“Well, technically you’ve met her twice.” She waits for him to catch up with the full weight of her sentence, after she realizes what she’s gone and screwed up. “Remember, we were at the - hey, how do you know she’s going to show up at your birthday? How do you know there’s going to be anything to show up to?”
“Because you told Sheldon and he’s really shitty at subtlety and secret keeping.” All of it’s the truth. She highly doubts Sheldon was specifically told to inquire about whether or not having Leonard’s girlfriend there would bother her; instead she’s fairly sure Leonard directed him to feel her out on the subject and he didn’t understand how that was different from actually asking. “It’s not a big deal. I think it’s sweet.”
“Yeah, well,” her words make him stumble over his own like always, easily turning him into the same unconfident geek with his hands shoved into his pockets that he was the day she first met him. “I just thought since you were big on birthdays that maybe it would be a good idea. It just works better if it was surprised.”
That part where he reverts to basically S1 Leonard? Yeah, problem number dos. They don't grow around each other; they just exist.
“I can pretend to be surprised.” After all, she is an actress. Or at least she’s trying to be.
“You may not have to act.” He sounds happy all of a sudden, like he just realized that he might still have tricks left up his sleeve. “You don’t know what we’ve got planned.”
She smiles, soft, even if he can’t see it. “Whatever you say. Just…bring her tonight. It’ll be nice and we might as well get her as used to Sheldon as possible. The shock wears off after the first five times or so; might as well get that over with.”
“Okay. I’ll see you tonight.”
She hangs up and lets herself in across the hall.
Sheldon takes one look at her as she enters, then nods. “As I sense we’re about to get into a discussion regarding social conventions and my not following them, as you so often like to, might I suggest that you are currently in the habit of regularly violating one.” Penny stares at him. Quickly, he clarifies, “I believe it’s called knocking.”
There’s a beat before she throws a half-hearted “right” his way, like she’s actually about to start doing that again. Some days she knocks, some days she doesn’t. It’s mood, and topic, dependent. “So I talked to Leonard about tonight and he’s bringing Michelle with him.”
He sits there and waits for her to continue. When she doesn’t, he prompts, “I’m not sure what part of that statement I’m supposed to reply to or in what form.”
“A nice ‘okay’ would work.”
“Oh. Okay.”
You know that tone. I mean really.
She rolls her eyes. “I’m just giving you a heads up so that maybe you’ll refrain from, you know, nagging her incessantly about how she chooses to eat her food or mock her when she doesn’t get some comic book reference.”
“Actually, Michelle is quite competent in regards to the latter.”
Well, that’s one thing working in the favor of her and Leonard having some sort of successful relationship. She’s also an astrophysicist. So there’s that. Penny straightens a little and rests one hand on the doorknob. “Great. Anyways, I’ll see you later.”
“Promptly at seven.”
Her smile is tight. She knows. “Promptly at seven.”
---
(Part Two)