{fic} - You learn something new every day
Title: You learn something new every day
Word Count: 1,853
Rating: PG
Pairing/Characters: Sheldon and Penny friendship (erm, if you squint and tilt your head to the side just so, you might find some Sheldon/Penny)
Spoilers: Post 3.19 so spoilers for everything up to that episode.
Disclaimer: I don’t own any of the characters or the show The Big Bang Theory. I don’t own Gilmore Girls either.
Summary: Inspired by renisanz ’s fanart “The consolation recurrence”. The day after Penny and Leonard break up, she spends the night with Sheldon
Author’s Notes: My muse was being totally uncooperative for this one and I'm not sure I'm entirely pleased with how it turned out, but I think it's okay. I actually wrote it going in a completely different direction (much more Sheldon/Penny if you get my gist) to begin with but I think this works better. Also, yeah Sheldon’s not wearing his pajamas in renisanz ’s art, but I think that pajamas were necessary for the fic; I hope it still works with the art well enough! :)
“You learn something every day if you pay attention” - Ray LeBlond
The day that Penny and Leonard break up, Penny learns a lot of things. Really deep, life lesson-type things about love and friendship and bowling. But that’s another story.
The day after Penny breaks up with Leonard, she learns three things:
1) Sheldon wears his watch everywhere. This includes while he’s asleep.
2) Lorelai Gilmore was way too cheerful and positive and optimistic for her own good.
3) The rate at which ice cream will melt depends on the amount of whipped-in air, the size of its ice crystals, and its framework of fat globules. Also, Sheldon is not too happy when ice cream melts on his bed.
"I recommend you to take care of the minutes, for hours will take care of themselves"
-Philip Dormer Stanhope
First of all; there’s the watch.
Penny knocks three times on Sheldon’s bedroom door, whispers his name (‘cause it’s like, 45 minutes past his bedtime or whatever and she’s not going to yell at him, no matter how much she just wants to scream at the world), and rebalances the items in her arms. The ice cream container is making her fingers and forearm numb where it’s touching them and the corner of her Gilmore Girls box-set is digging into her side painfully. Also, she’s got a spoon in between her teeth so her next words come out sounding pretty muffled.
“Sheldon please let me in.” She tries to come across sounding quiet and annoyed and persuasive at the same time but it’s kind of a difficult thing to pull off, and right now she just sounds like she’s got a spoon in her mouth.
Finally, she hears shuffling on the other side of the door and then he opens it, all plaid pajamas and rumpled hair. She can tell that he was either asleep or crying because his voice is rough around the edges and he’s not nearly as neatly trimmed and in between the lines as he normally is.
“Penny, you are well-aware that no one is allowed in my room. You are also aware, or you would be if you had even bothered to read the memo that I sent you the week after you moved in across the hall, that my bedtime was exactly - ” He pauses to check his watch, and what the hell? He wears his watch to bed? Weirdo. “... 46 minutes ago.”
She actually has no idea why she’s even here. It probably has something to do with the fact that she’s always been the type of girl that needs to like, be with someone after a breakup, to sort of keep her mind off of things. Obviously, for the past few years that person’s been some random dude at bar, and she’s kept her mind off things with sex and alcohol, but before all of that she used to just settle for a few girlfriends, a chick flick, and some chocolate. And since this whole thing with Leonard sort of makes her feel fifteen again, (in this really weird way, like she’s heartbroken for the first time or something) she figures that it’s okay to fall back on her teenage post-breakup ritual.
So since Leonard is in Las Vegas with Raj and Howard, she’s decided that Sheldon can be her company tonight and, despite his demeaning tone and the fact that he’s rolling his eyes as she explains all of this to him, she’s pretty sure she was right, and he’s been crying again tonight. The edges of his eyes are just little bit redder than they normally are and she can see marks on his palms from where his fingernails have been digging into the skin as he fists his hands to try to keep from crying (she knows, because that’s exactly what she’s been doing ever since yesterday at the bowling alley).
So whatever; he could probably use some ice cream and a few episodes of Gilmore Girls just as much as she could (and if not, he can just deal), so she rolls her eyes and shoulders her way into the room.
“You know Superman's fortress of solitude? A Jamaican beach compared to my mother's house.” - Lorelai Gilmore
Then, they watch Gilmore Girls.
Sheldon refuses to watch Gilmore Girls.
Actually, weirdly enough, he doesn’t refuse to watch it right off the bat; he starts off sitting up beside her in bed, hands clasped together tightly and eyes narrowed at the screen. Then after like, 20 minutes he’s flipped onto his side and is mumbling about the lack of scientific accuracy in the show, because of some tiny little poster in the background of one scene that had like, inaccurate scientific facts on it or something.
Then he gets extra pissy when they have to skip from episode three to episode seven because the disk got pretty badly scratched last week when Raj and Howard borrowed it and they still haven’t bought her a new one. Sheldon’s going on and on about unfinished plot lines and unanswered questions when she reminds him that he wasn’t even watching in the first place. This makes him scrunch up his face and make a weird hissing noise like a cat and flop back down into the fetal position again.
Penny’s kinda smiling at this whole thing though because she totally knew that Sheldon was watching it out of the corner of his eye all along. So she takes pity on him and goes into a deep explanation of the three missing episodes. At first he doesn’t pay her any attention, but by the time she’s halfway into explaining the fourth episode he’s sitting back up in bed, legs crossed and facing her, and they’re arguing over what it means for your life if you get a D on a test and Sheldon’s all upset about the cat dying, and it’s actually pretty fun.
After she finishes explaining the missing episodes Sheldon settles back down and she presses play thinking this might have actually been a sane decision after all, coming to spend the night with Sheldon.
Then like, ten minutes into the seventh episode, Sheldon’s gets all twitchy and he starts freaking out about Rory stealing from the store while she just rolls her eyes at him and explains that, hello, this was her first kiss, there are some things more important than stealing a package of cornstarch or whatever, and scoops more ice cream into her mouth. He scoffs at her and rolls his eyes right back, but then he actually does shut his hole and turn back to the TV silently.
She counts it as a win that he doesn’t flip back onto his side for another two episodes.
“I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream.”
And at the end, the ice cream melts.
Half-way through the season (and about four hours past Sheldon’s bed-time) Penny’s nearing the bottom of the ice cream. As she scoops another spoonful into her mouth she feels Sheldon shift slightly beside her and turns to glance at him.
His head is sort of tilted towards her some more and she could almost swear that he’s no longer watching the TV. Shrugging, she scoops out a huge amount of ice cream and, leaning over so that she’s draped all over Sheldon and her elbow is pressed like, into his neck, she waves the spoon in front of his face.
“You want some?”
She feels him recoil underneath her and his face scrunches up in disgust.
“Penny, are you at all aware of the amount of bacteria that is currently-” but he cuts himself off abruptly when a huge dollop of ice cream slips off the spoon and onto his comforter.
Oh crap, shit just got real.
“Penny!” He’s shrieking at her now, using way too many long, scientific sounding words, not to mention some random words that she thinks might actually be in another language (quite possibly that one from Star Trek. What’s it called? Oh yeah, Klingon), for her to even begin to understand. But she gets the gist and, waving a hand at him to try to shut him up, she pads out of the room to get a washcloth and some Tide to Go and like, Febreze or something.
When she gets back to the room ten minutes later with an armful of cleaning supplies and a pair of rubber gloves, she’s prepared for a Sheldon version of cleaning boot-camp. What she gets is a softly snoring, plaid wearing, ice cream spoon holding, Sheldon, curled up on the edge of the bed and, she bends around him to check, yep he’s arranged himself so that no part of his body is touching anywhere within two inches of the ice cream stain on the covers.
Sighing happily as she dumps the cleaning supplies in the corner, Penny shuffles over to the bed, pries the spoon from Sheldon’s hand, and settles back down to watch the rest of the season.
She smiles as she scoops some almost-liquid ice cream into her mouth; this was actually a great way to take her mind off things, it’s like, in this room, at this time, it’s only her and Sheldon and the Gilmore girls, and the real world and all it’s real world problems can just go die.
Penny turns the volume on the TV way down; she doesn’t want to wake Sheldon right now, partly because he looks weirdly peaceful when he’s asleep, (like all that science has been stripped away and all that’s left is just, Sheldon) and partly because she’s pretty sure that there’s some more of this ice cream in his freezer and he’ll never let her have it if he’s awake.
“It's what you learn after you know it all that counts.” - Attributed to Harry S. Truman
The next morning (after he lures Penny out of his bed with a cup of coffee and sets her on the couch with his laptop and Age of Conan, and after he changes his sheets) Sheldon records the events of the night before in his social interactions log.
He realizes, with a slight shock, after he’s written two and a half pages, that he’s learnt more from spending one night with Penny than he has through all of his extensive research with comic strips and Google searches.
He also realizes that his study has evolved from being about the female gender as a whole and now centers solely around Penny. He tapes the receipt for the ice cream onto the page so he remembers the exact type that she enjoys so much, and he makes a side note to remember to talk to Koothrappali and Wolowitz about buying her a new box-set.
He isn’t quite sure why it’s so necessary for him to have a catalogue of all of this information about Penny, but he has a strange feeling that in later years, some of it will probably come in handy.
He’s right of course, but then again, when has be ever been wrong?