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ravenI'm sure there were less productive things I could have done with my weekend than write this story, but I'm having trouble, right now, thinking of any.
Er - this story has major spoilers for season 4 of Deep Space Nine. I don't know, it's a thing. The episodes they watch are "Body Parts", "Broken Link", "Looking for par'Mach...", and "The Begotten", in case anyone, ah, cares.
Fic:: Looking For par'Mach In All The Wrong Places
by Raven
7000w, The Big Bang Theory, Penny/Leonard/Sheldon. Penny has started taking relationship advice from Star Trek. Things can only get better from here.
At eleven o'clock on a Friday night, curled up on the couch next to a giant bowl of popcorn, Penny comes to two important realisations in quick succession. Firstly, that Leonard - who is on the couch on the other side of the giant bowl of popcorn, with his hand outstretched halfway towards it as though he's forgotten entirely where he is and what he's doing - isn't angry, but unhappy; and secondly, something she's been dreading for years has finally happened.
"Oh, hey," Leonard says, softly, coming back to himself at the sound of the Deep Space Nine theme and going for the bowl, "I love this one. It's the one with the shuttle accident, and Bashir has to..."
"Shut up!" Penny waves a finger. "You're gonna be all, and then there's a shuttle accident, and then Bashir gets swapped with his counterpart from an evil alternate universe and Quark starts a Zumba class and then the Dominion attacks with hummus, and I'm like, I was gonna watch that."
"I didn't say anything!" Leonard lifts his hands in supplication. "For the record, none of those things happen." He glances up at her through his lashes. "Well, maybe."
Penny rolls her eyes, hits pause and gets up to fetch another beer. "You want one?"
"Thanks." Leonard flips over the DVD case, still with the plastic hanging off it. "I didn't know you liked this show. We have it too, you could have borrowed it."
"I could have," Penny says, "and you would have talked about, I don't know, ship classes and continuity errors and, you know, nerd stuff. Not about, say, how hot Alexander Siddig is."
Leonard inclines his head at the TV. "He was," he allows. "I don't know, maybe he hasn't aged well."
"Maybe," Penny says, and before she hits play again, asks: "Are you ever going home?"
"No," Leonard says, calmly. "If you kick me out, I'll sleep in my lab."
He really will, Penny realises; it's not some kind of ploy for her to let him stay. He's not even looking at her, searching for something – presumably contemporary pictures of Alexander Siddig – on his phone.
"Hell," Penny says, out loud, "it's not like you take up much space." Leonard looks up, a little startled, and she ruffles his hair instinctively. She presses play, and they both watch Quark and Rom arguing on screen. Quark thinks he's dying and Rom is kind of sad and kind of happy he's going to inherit Quark's bar and it's all very fraught but at least, Penny thinks, they talk about their feelings.
"What was the fight about, Leonard?" she asks, very softly, but Leonard doesn't answer.
*
Sheldon doesn't, either, when she asks him.
"I have a ghost in my apartment," she says, spotting him in the corner of the laundry room hefting his basket of clothes, and he raises an eyebrow at her.
"There's no such thing."
He's looking for fabric softener. Penny stamps her foot. "What, no ten-minute lecture on the history of alleged paranormal activity in the United States? What is wrong with you both?"
Sheldon looks at her, and then behind him. "I'm the only other person here."
"Let's pretend," Penny says, exasperated, and – she admits it – a little amused, "I just said, Sheldon, do you have to take everything I say literally, and you said, yes, and I said, I asked for that, huh, and move on."
"That's acceptable."
"I don't care, honey. What is wrong with you and Leonard? What did you two fight about?"
Sheldon doesn't answer. He starts unloading clothes from his basket to put them in a washer, but not accurately, so they fall to the floor in between and he has to lean down and pick them up, and put them back in the basket, and try again, and drop them again. Penny has a sudden feeling that she's witnessing the first scene of a Hallmark movie. "Okay, Sheldon," she says, lifting a hand so he has to pay attention to her and the whole awful laundry thing can't start up again. "Let's try this from the top. I have a ghost in my apartment."
"There's no such thing."
It's precisely the same inflection as last time. Penny marvels. "Oh, but I do," she says, waving a hand. "His name is Leonard Hofstadter."
Sheldon just looks at her.
"He's living in my apartment," Penny clarifies, "but working nights. Some sciency tech thing." She knows perfectly well that it's to do with supercomputer time being easier to access at night, but it's fun to see Sheldon's left eyebrow twitch. "So he's only there when I'm not."
She'd expected it to be, if not creepy, at least a little strange, but it isn't, not at all. Leonard tidies up after himself, leaves her little notes on the refrigerator. Last night she got home from work, tossed her keys on the side and found a cup of coffee on the table just where her hand would reach for it, sweetened right and still hot.
"He says," Penny says, finally, when it looks like Sheldon isn't going to say anything again ever, "that he's not going back. What happened between you two?"
Sheldon says, after a moment, looking down into the washer, "I don't know."
"Huh." Penny sits down on the floor of the laundry room next to him. "Don't hear that much, from you."
"Perhaps," Sheldon says, almost-but-not-quite slipping down to sit beside her, "I breached an unspoken social convention."
"Yeah, but Leonard doesn't usually…" She stops, gestures at random. "Tell me the whole thing, okay?"
"There is nothing to tell." Sheldon sounds frustrated but also inarticulate, which is kind of worrying. Kind of unprecedented, actually. "Leonard and I were talking about..."
A long pause, while something drips and Sheldon just stares at the floor mutely.
"Star Trek?" Penny tries. "Thai food? Who drank all the orange juice?"
"Bose-Einstein condensates."
"Obviously. Go on."
"Our discussion concluded civilly. He went to take a shower. I heard the water running, then I heard it stop. I gathered he took several minutes to find his glasses. He got dressed. He went across the hallway. You likely have a better understanding of what transpired next than I."
"That's it?" Penny asks, when he doesn't say anything else – what transpired next was Leonard walking into Penny's apartment, asking to sleep on the couch and getting distracted by Alexander Siddig's beautiful face – and Sheldon just nods. This doesn't explain, Penny's thinking, why she has an experimental physicist haunting her apartment, nor why she's sitting on her ass on a cold laundry room floor surrounded by Sheldon's clothes, or basically anything. Somehow not a whole lot about her life makes sense right now.
Sheldon says, suddenly: "You were watching Deep Space Nine."
"How'd you know?"
"The theme music," Sheldon says. "He likes Babylon 5 better."
Maybe he does, Penny thinks, but in that case, he likes Babylon 5 a whole lot.
*
"And then," Penny says, outraged, "it turns out Kira is having Chief O'Brien's baby! I mean – I missed one episode. One. That's why I got the stupid DVDs. Not because I'm – like, you know. I just, it was on in reruns when I got home, and then I had to do the late shift that one night and I just…"
Bernadette seems to be finding it difficult to breathe.
"What's so funny?" Penny demands, but she knows. She knows perfectly well. She puts two slices of cheesecake on a plate and then on a tray and stomps off to the table by the window, and then when she comes back Bernadette can just about talk again.
"I'm sorry, honey," she says, wiping her eyes, "but you just – you've been living across from those guys too long."
"Yeah, I know," Penny says, "I know." In a different tone, she adds: "I guess, you don't…"
"Hey, I love that show." Bernadette starts loading up the next tray. "I watched it in high school." She smiles, apparently at the memory. "I squeezed it in between AP Biology and cheerleading practice, I was kind of an overscheduled kid. If you want I'll come over sometime, we can watch it together."
For a moment, Penny imagines Bernadette in high school, waving pom-poms by day and watching Star Trek by night, giggly and nerdy and smart. It's a nice thought. "That'd be cool," Penny says, and means it.
Later, when they've closed up and they're wiping down the tables, Bernadette asks, "Why didn't you borrow the DVDs from Leonard? Or go over and watch it with them?"
Penny realises, suddenly, that if Bernadette doesn't know, then Wolowitz doesn't know. And that means Leonard and Sheldon aren't talking, not just to her and each other, but to anyone. "They – kind of had a fight," she says, tentatively. "I mean, maybe? Leonard has kind of moved in with me."
"Kind of?" Bernadette repeats, sceptically. "Leonard's living with you? Were you going to mention that, like, any time soon?"
"It's not a big deal," Penny says, firmly, because it's not. It's just Leonard. That night she finds one of his notes on the couch (got more coffee, will pick up milk), flips it over and writes: sleep in the bed, I don't mind. At first she thinks he goes on sleeping on the couch anyway, because the bed is neat and made when she comes to get in it, but then she remembers how he sleeps, curled up tight beneath the covers, and when she snuggles down she can feel the warmth he left behind, lingering between the sheets.
*
On Tuesday night Sheldon comes in to the Cheesecake Factory to eat and something inside Penny finally snaps. Raj and Howard are around, they order what they usually order, they're talking about Hellblazer or something – or something, Penny thinks, resignedly; she bought the stupid comic for her stupid nephew and now she has John Constantine slash in her browser history – and then when they've eaten they both head home. Sheldon gets up slowly, looks around him as though he doesn’t know what to do with himself now, and although he walks with perfect precision of movement to the door, Penny is thinking suddenly of Leonard sitting on her couch with his hand outstretched towards the popcorn, halfway between somewhere and nowhere.
"Oh, God," Penny says, to Bernadette, "it's like Bambi after his mother died" – and then stops and adds, "Can you cover me for an hour? Please – I'll make it up to you."
"Run, Thumper, run," Bernadette says, and Penny does actually run – because if she leaves work an hour early, she'll make it home before Leonard leaves to go hide out in his lab. She crashes through her apartment door shouting, "Leonard, wake up – shit, what the hell are you doing?"
"Ah!" Leonard jerks back, startled, hits his head on the window sash and ends up sprawled and barefoot on the floor. "Ah, hi. You're back early."
Penny stands over him with her hands on her hips and considers just picking him up and throwing him straight out of the open window. "Oh my God, are you trying to get yourself killed?"
Leonard blinks. "We're on the fourth floor. I'd only get myself maimed."
"Because, yes, Leonard, that is so the take-home message here!" she yells. "What were you doing?"
"Ah, looking at the moon," he says, half-sitting up with his arm over his eyes, "which I can explain, ah, could you, um, could you stop yelling." He gets himself to his feet, perches under the window and half-hangs out again, still kind of perilously in Penny's opinion, but at least he's looking up and not down. "The moon. Maybe we could see it better somewhere else?"
They could see it better from apartment 4A, which has windows that face the other direction, but neither of them mentions that. They end up on the roof, sitting in folding chairs one of the other tenants left out, looking up at the clear California sky. "See," Leonard says, pointing up at the low, heavy crescent moon. "Can you see, where the rest of the disc should be…"
Penny takes a second, but she makes it out: the other half of the moon shining faint grey against the sky.
"Earthlight," Leonard says, softly. "It's the reflected light from the Earth – albedo, that's called, but I hate that word – that shows it up like that. I like it."
"You're right," Penny says, after a moment of silence. "It's pretty."
She leans over and puts her head on his shoulder; he turns and kisses her hair. It ought to be weird, Penny thinks, but it feels natural. They sit like that for a little while, close and quiet, and she realises it's because they've been closer than this, all week: they've been occupying the same space, breathing the same air.
"Leonard," she says, very gently, "what the hell happened between you and Sheldon?"
*
Leonard takes a very long time to answer. When he does he stands up, paces up and down underneath that clear sky. "I slipped," he says, finally.
Penny blinks. "Once more, with clarity."
"In the shower." Leonard takes his glasses off and polishes them on his sleeve. "My feet were wet, because…"
"Because Sheldon makes you wash them, yeah," Penny says, spreading her palms. "So?"
"So I slipped. I nearly fell and cracked my head open on the tiles. Came this close." Leonard holds up his finger and thumb, an inch apart. "And I thought, what would Sheldon do, if I had? If I'd smashed my head on the hard floor and he heard the noise through the door?"
"So?" Penny's impatient. "What would Sheldon do?"
"Well, that's just it." Leonard is pacing up and down again, turning before he reaches the edge of the room, coming back. "I don't know. I mean - I know what you would do. You just did it."
Penny blinks again, and then realises he means the window: that she pulled him back from the edge when she thought he was going to fall. "That's just – what people do, honey."
"Yeah." Leonard puts his glasses back on and sits down beside her. "And I thought – I literally don't know what Sheldon would do, if he found me like that. If he'd pick me up and take me to the ER or run a study on the rate of blood loss in the adult male human. And in the meantime my life is slipping away." Another gesture: a helpless, expansive wave at the view of rooftops. "The only life I will have is slipping away in foot-washing, molecularly precise gift-giving, the Babylon 5 embargo and Anything-Can-Happen Thursday. Why can't things happen every day?"
"Leonard," Penny says, and breathes in, and wishes this was still five minutes ago; she thinks she and Leonard communicate best in the quiet spaces. "Sweetie. You can't live with me forever."
"I know," Leonard mutters, "and I'm really grateful you…"
"Leonard, are you listening to me?" Penny stands up and takes both of his hands. "You can't live with me forever. Go downstairs and get your laptop and go on Craigslist. Find another place to live. Tell Sheldon he needs to find another roommate. Stop hanging out with him and me. Go. Leave. I'm giving you permission. Make things happen."
Leonard freezes. She feels the tension enter his fingers clasped in hers, and then all the lines of his body. He's looking at her with something like fear in his eyes. "Now?"
"What are you waiting for?" She gives him a little shake. "Thursday?"
"No," he says, half-choked, and Penny can't decide if she wants to shake him some more or pull him in and hug him. She settles on gripping his hand and pulling him to the roof door and down the stairs. Round and round they go, with him trailing behind her, until they reach the door to 4A and barge in without knocking.
Sheldon jumps off the couch in surprise. "Penny! What are you – Leonard?"
After a minute, Leonard steps out from behind Penny. "Hi, Sheldon."
"Leonard," Sheldon says again, sounding lost and confused, "you…"
"Sheldon!" Penny interrupts, stepping forwards. "Let's play hypotheticals. What would you do, if – let's pick an example completely at random – you heard a thump from the bathroom, and you went in and found Leonard had fallen and hit his head on the tiles?"
Something of the confidence has come back into Sheldon's expression: this sort of thing, he understands. "Isn't it obvious?"
"No," Leonard says, tiredly; Penny moves back a step, close enough to hear the rise in pitch of his breathing.
Sheldon glances from one of them to the other. "I'd go get Penny."
"Why?" Leonard asks sharply.
Sheldon raises both eyebrows this time: to him, this really is obvious. "Because she'd know what to do. And she can drive."
"Oh," Leonard says, sitting down abruptly on the arm of the couch, "well, then" – and he is kind of laughing at that, though Penny can hear the note of hysteria in it.
Sheldon's looking at him, then at Penny, then back again. "Leonard, what's this all about?"
Penny says, "Because the two of you can't talk to each other like adults, Leonard has spent the entire week wondering if he should leave you because he doesn't know if you care about him at all" – and that might have been an unfortunate choice of phrasing, though actually, not so much.
"Leaving?" Leonard and Sheldon say together, in very different tones: Leonard, because the idea of him leaving, and Sheldon, and leaving Sheldon, have clearly never all come together for him in precisely the right order before, and Sheldon, because he's looking at Leonard and the open space of this apartment like it just doesn't compute, like what's coming together for Leonard is what he can't take apart.
"Leaving," Leonard mutters again, and looking up to meet Sheldon's eyes on him, "Sheldon, I wasn't going to, I couldn't, I can't…" – and Penny realises, at least five minutes after she should have done, what's about to happen and how she should be elsewhere, that she can't just stand here and witness something like this happening for the first time in the middle of their living room.
But then Sheldon sits down on the couch next to Leonard and pulls him down, his hands threading through Leonard's hair, and Penny turns away, literally spins on her heel, but not so quickly that she doesn't see Leonard's head drop to Sheldon's shoulder, and hear him breathe out, and settle into that hold. She goes straight to the door and pulls it closed behind her and stands in the hallway for a few minutes, partly to pull herself together and partly – to be honest – to listen for sounds from inside. She hears Leonard saying something and Sheldon's quick, curt response, and Leonard laughing, and after that it's silent, like two people are carefully not saying anything, and she goes into her own apartment and slams the door.
She's making hot chocolate and digging through the freezer for ice-cream, wondering why her apartment is chilled and then closing the wide-open window, when Leonard appears in the doorway, taking small steps inside. He looks dishevelled and his eyes are red-rimmed, but he's smiling as he reaches out towards her. "Penny," he says, very softly, "we're watching Deep Space Nine. Come join us."
Penny wants to say something like, you two just upended your entire relationship and kind of maybe agreed to stick around in each other's lives forever, but you did it in time for Star Trek, but she doesn't. She puts her keys back into her bag and follows him. Inside Leonard and Sheldon's apartment it's quiet and warm as it always is, and while she settles on the couch and pulls a blanket over her knees, Sheldon finds the DVD and puts it in the drive. He comes back to sit down on his spot, with Leonard leaning up against him. Penny takes a moment to look at them – Sheldon seems calm as always, though a little flushed; Leonard is soft-eyed and relaxed – and puts her arm around them both.
"I like this one," Leonard says, looking up, "it's the one where Odo gets sick, and then they go to the Gamma Quadrant, and Garak…"
"Shut up," Penny tells him, and leans her head on his shoulder again. Maybe they just upended everything and put it all back where it was. Maybe that's okay.
*
It's a great story to dine out on for a couple of days. Bernadette squeals and says she knew it all along and Stuart down at the comic book store starts laughing the laugh of the vindicated man, and then, when they get to him, Penny never thought she'd see Howard Wolowitz speechless. "Leonard, and Sheldon," he says after a while, "Leonard, and Sheldon" – and then he kind of gets stuck again; Raj pats him on the back comfortingly and smiles ruefully up at Penny. "I just," Wolowitz is saying, "I thought. Sheldon isn't… like, he doesn't even like…"
He makes an obscene, very evocative gesture. Penny rolls her eyes. "It's not like that. At least, I think," she amends. She admits, privately, that she doesn't know; what Sheldon's deal is, and what Leonard thinks about it. She guesses it's none of her business. "But it's – it's the real thing."
Bernadette and Raj sigh happily at that; Howard looks like his omelette just spat at him, which is to say, not offended, but surprised. Penny laughs and goes to get the drinks they ordered. When her shift ends, Bernadette comes home with Penny and they pick up a bottle of wine on the way. Penny has borrowed season 5 of Deep Space Nine from Leonard and Sheldon and she's almost resigned to the fact she's genuinely excited about what happens next. Bernadette makes popcorn and they eat it and drink wine and get through a couple of episodes without talking a whole lot, though she gasps and laughs and sighs in the right places.
"Time for one more," Bernadette says, finally, as it's getting pretty late. "It's a good one, though" – and she presses play, and Penny, drifting a little on a white-wine cloud, sits up and pays attention. It's fun, it makes her laugh. Quark's in love with a Klingon who's also his ex-wife – it's a long story – and Dax and Worf are dancing around each other, closer and closer, and Penny stuffs popcorn in her mouth: she loves a good romance. And Kira is having Miles O'Brien's baby, which isn't nearly as scandalous as it sounds, she's the surrogate, and he and Kira and Miles's wife Keiko all get along fine, only, Kira is sort of falling for him, and he for her, and it's really awkward, because he's married, he loves Keiko, and Penny is crying into her wineglass and Bernadette is laughing a little at first, but then putting an arm around her, and saying, "Shh, honey, it's okay, it's okay."
"It's so stupid," Penny says, waving her glass at the screen, "they love each other, and Kira, she loves them too, they should just…"
Bernadette says, "Honey, it's okay."
"It's not," Penny says, "it's stupid, it's so stupid, it's the worst."
And because it's stupid – because Penny may have discovered her inner nerd, and she may be genuinely worried about Kira Nerys's emotional well-being right now, but there's got to be a line: this far, and no further – she stands up and puts the empty popcorn bowl in the sink and says, "I should change my sheets."
Bernadette says nothing, gathering up the empty bottle and putting it in the recycling, and rinsing out the glasses.
"I should, I should," Penny's saying, "give them back their DVDs, and…"
"And?" Bernadette says, softly.
"And," Penny says, waving a hand; she doesn't know what else. "And – something."
Bernadette is silent for a long time, and Penny remembers out of nowhere that Bernadette, who is standing with the water running over her hands with an odd stillness about her, isn't just kind, and good company: she's smart. Not the smartest person Penny knows, but that bar's been getting higher recently. "What you told me, the other night," Bernadette says, at last. "About Leonard and Sheldon, after you came down from the roof."
"Yeah," Penny says. She's feeling tired now, and drunk, and a little ashamed of herself, although what for, she's not sure. She flumps back down on the couch, saying, "I told you – well. It was…" She can't think of the word for what it was. "It was… well."
"And afterwards," Bernadette says, thoughtfully, switching off the faucet, "they asked you in."
Penny, who's drifting tipsily off on the back of the couch, sits up sharply. "What does that mean?"
"I don't know," Bernadette says. "Why don't you find out?"
*
Penny can't just go over there and ask. Nor can she, though she does consider it, watch something like eighteen episodes of Deep Space Nine in one day so she has an excuse to go over and borrow the next season. In the end she just pours the milk down the sink and goes across the hall.
"In the refrigerator," Sheldon says, absently, when she goes in and asks for it. Leonard isn't immediately around, though she can hear someone else moving in the apartment and figures he's in his room. Sheldon seems engrossed in something – he's writing something on a flipchart – and barely notices Penny taking the milk out of the refrigerator door. She considers licking all the fruit while he's not looking but then decides that would be cruel.
"You'll be pleased to hear," she says, going through the cupboards for good measure – they're bound to have Pop Tarts, and she has nothing for tomorrow's breakfast – "that I no longer have a ghost in my apartment."
Sheldon looks at her impassively. "Have you stopped kicking your cat?"
"Have I…" – Penny waves her hands around. "Okay, what the hell is this about, now?"
Sheldon methodically writes another line on his flipchart before answering. "It's a question," he says, very seriously, "that appears superficially comprehensible but actually has no basis in logic. You do not have a cat, and even if you did, you would not – at least I presume you wouldn't, who even knows why anyone does anything – kick it. Similarly, Leonard…"
"Leonard!" Penny says, seizing on that gratefully. "Let's talk about Leonard. Are you happy?"
"Am I happy?" Sheldon's eyes narrow. "I thought we were talking about Leonard."
"Okay, I guess we're talking about you." Penny leans back against the countertop. "Are you?"
"Am I what?"
"Happy!" Penny yells out, and why the hell not, because it's a valid question and not one, in Penny's opinion, that people ask of themselves and others enough. "Are you happy?"
"Yes," Sheldon says. He says it perfectly expressionlessly, crossing out a line and adding something beneath. Penny shakes her head, smiling, and Leonard comes out into the living room, holding a plastic box.
"What's all the yelling about? Hey, Penny." Leonard sits down on the couch and says, "Where were we? Oh, yes, J. Michael Strazynski."
"Oh, my God," Penny says, "you're really doing this." She gestures to Sheldon's flipchart, and Leonard's expectant expression. "I should have figured," she adds, after a moment. "I mean, the Roommate Agreement was… but this…"
"It's actually," Leonard says, and he might be blushing a little, "quite a lot simpler this time around. Sheldon, listen to me. Babylon 5 is – you're not giving it a chance."
"The opening voiceover is stupid," Penny tells him, and then watches sadly as her inner nerd cheerfully gets out of the smouldering remains of her inner closet and goes cavorting into the sunset. Or to Comic-Con. Whatever.
"I admit that," Leonard says, after giving her a startled glance. "But" – he's putting the DVD in as he says it – "it gets better. At first it's – kind of ponderous, and slow, and the acting is really, really" – he cringes – "really bad."
"It was the dawn of the Third Age of mankind," says the portentous voice on the screen, "ten years after the Earth-Minbari war…"
For possibly the first time ever, Sheldon and Penny exchange understanding glances. Leonard, who is sitting cross-legged on the couch and gesturing while he's talking, doesn't notice. "You just have to stick with it," he says, hitting pause, "just keep going, and it's not like it gets good and you don't notice, though that does happen, it's just, with the commitment you put into it, you start finding that it means something. I know you don't like it, Sheldon, and you don't have to – it's just, I do. I do, and I can't…"
"Wait," Penny says, as he falls silent, "have you, all this time, I mean, was that always a metaphor for sex, oh, my God. "
"What?" Leonard says, and then blinks twice, drops to the couch and puts his head in his hands. "Oh… no. No, no. "
Penny thinks she may, possibly, be a little in love with him.
*
After that, there only seems to be one more option.
"Sheldon," Penny says, making a decision, "I'm going to pick Leonard up in a second and make out with him on the couch. Do you mind?"
After a second during which a lot of mental cogs seem to be turning, Sheldon shakes his head.
"Leonard, do you?"
"Hey," Leonard's saying, "how come you asked him first" – but he's shaking his head while he says it, so Penny gets up, puts her arms around him, pulls him up to standing sharply enough for his feet to leave the ground for a moment, kisses him for a long and beautiful minute and then pushes him down onto the cushions. He closes his eyes and she takes her time over it. They've had so many first kisses, and last kisses, and ones in between, but this one – Penny's conscious of Sheldon's presence, his eyes on her from where he's standing by the kitchen counter – this one is a different kind of in between.
"Ah," Leonard says, when she pulls back and he's collected his wits enough to talk again, "what is, what is happening to me right now?"
Penny hesitates, then throws it in. "Looking For par'Mach In All The Wrong Places."
There's a long pause.
"I'm assuming," Leonard says, and it's kind of obscene that his voice is quite so level, when he's lying there with his eyes half-closed and his hands above his head, "that no one is a Klingon in this scenario."
"Yeah, no," Penny says, firmly. "No Klingons. No death."
From behind her, Sheldon says, "But they didn't…"
"But we can," Leonard says, with understanding, and he looks – happy. Like he's solved a problem after years of trying; like now, finally, x equals something real. "We can."
"Yes," Penny says, and she's smiling back. She leans down and kisses him again, he makes a small, helpless noise and she can't help herself: she gets down on her knees in front of the couch and leans forwards. For a moment, his wrists are back above his head, pinned down under her hands, and Penny has a sudden delicious shiver at the thought of what else might have gone into the new improved agreement. He looks up at her with his eyes wide and his lips parted and she gets on top of him on the couch, so their bodies pressed together and she can feel his body heat through his clothes. She needs a moment: she's just lying there with her feet on the end of the couch so it's taking some of her weight off Leonard, though not a lot, judging from the pitch of his breathing.
"Hey," he says, after a second, pushing himself up on his elbows, "you okay?"
"Yeah," she says, still taking her moment, breathing in the scent of him, which is mostly dusty old textbooks and soap, but with the visceral familiarity of her own sheets. "It's just – sudden. You know." After another moment, she moves slightly sideways and adds, "Shit, Leonard, you walked out on Sheldon and straight into my bed, didn't you realise…"
"I should have," he murmurs, his body arching off the couch to meet hers, "I should have, my mother always said I had the self-awareness of a pond snail…"
She laughs, pushes herself back on him, going for the friction, smiling as he trails off, his eyes going glassy as he loses track of what he was saying.
"Leonard was in your bed?" Sheldon asks. He doesn't sound jealous, just interested. The sound of his voice brings Penny back to the fact that he's there, and from the speed at which Leonard's head turns, it's had the same effect on him.
"Uh, yeah," Penny says, sitting up, ignoring Leonard breathing out with a huff as she accidentally forces the air out of his lungs. "When he was working nights, he was sleeping in my bed in the day."
"Oh," Sheldon says. "You weren't…"
"Well," Leonard says, "we might. Now."
"Now?" Sheldon says, alarmed.
"Well," Penny says, "not right now" – ignoring the disappointment creasing Leonard's features – "and oh, this is going to start getting awkward, isn't it." Awkward, maybe, soon won't cut it: it might have to be weird and, and, freaky. She's still half-lying on Leonard, his hair standing on end and mouth bruised where her lips have been, and Sheldon is just sort of sitting there with his eyes wide in witness.
"Oh," Leonard says, "oh. Yeah."
Sheldon, though, isn't fazed, and why would he be. He gets off the stool he was sitting on and stretches out, walks across casually as a cat like this is something he does all the time. "We were drafting an agreement," he says, lightly, reaching for his pen, "I see it's going to need several more sections."
"An agreement," Penny says, a little wildly, and then: "Why not. Okay. An agreement." She gives Leonard a kiss before she stands up. "Why the hell not."
Leonard rolls over, lands on his ass on the floor next to the couch and says, "What do we do now?"
Penny says, with more confidence this time, "We work it out."
"A three-body problem," Leonard says, still sitting on the floor, and laughs. "Like a triple star. Or the moon, the Earth and the sun."
All reflecting off one another, Penny thinks as she walks across to join Sheldon, and smiles. Because if this is it – if this is what embracing her inner nerd is all about, all carefully-delineated boundaries and stories about space stations and the other two souls haunting her apartment and yes, her life – well, that's fine. That's fine.
She's still not owning up to Hellblazer porn. Or the thing about Bert and Ernie.
*
It's a long, complicated night. It involves quite a lot of walking around, gesturing at flipcharts and yelling, and Penny and Leonard ganging up on Sheldon and she and Sheldon ganging up on Leonard. (They try to gang up on her a couple of times, but it doesn't work so well.) Late in the evening, she takes some time and goes back to her own apartment, makes the hot chocolate she came to borrow the milk for. She walks around her own space, her own things, her own life, knowing that Leonard is watching over Sheldon and that Leonard, who needs so much, sometimes, knows that he's needed, and that sometimes, not all the time, they can be enough for each other. When she goes back she makes them both taste the hot chocolate, Sheldon out of the cup and Leonard out of her mouth, and that one is yet another different kind of first kiss, but, she thinks, a good one. And although Sheldon has an odd shyness in him right now, something she thinks will pass with time and space, she sees what happens next because she's looking for it: his hands gripping Leonard's as he moves to wash the cup.
"I'll do it," Leonard murmurs, leaning over to take the cup from him, and Penny's close enough to see the very quick kiss Sheldon leaves on the top of Leonard's head, and then the look he gives her straight after, a little defiant, but mostly soft and sweet.
"One last thing," Penny says. It's not actually the last thing: at the end of this night, she's going to go home to her own bed, and she's going to take Leonard with her, and she's going to take his glasses off, tenderly, and lay him out, and exorcise the ghosts of doubt and poor communication skills out of her mattress. She's wondering if she should ask for Sheldon's permission in Leonard's earshot: she rather thinks she will. It's in the agreement, and she'll enjoy the hectic flush that will come to his cheeks, and the small, helpless smile. But before that, something else: something else with all three. "Leonard, take Babylon 5 out of the fucking DVD player."
Sheldon laughs at that, a real laugh, though subdued and a little rusty, and they end up on the couch, all of them, watching the episode of Deep Space Nine where Kira Nerys finally has her baby.
"That's it?" Penny asks, at the end, while texting Bernadette; the reply comes less than five seconds later and it's all in caps. "She has the baby and goes back to her boyfriend – who, by the way, is stupid and boring, shut up Shakaar everyone hates you. Everything goes back to normal at the end?"
"They do name the baby after her," Leonard says thoughtfully, and Sheldon hums agreement so Penny can feel the vibration as well as hear it. "It's kind of sweet. Kirayoshi O'Brien."
"Kirayoshi O'Brien," Penny says. "Okay, that's okay. I still think they should have…" She waves a hand to indicate herself, Leonard and Sheldon. "It would be better."
"Yes," Sheldon says, clipped, "a far superior state of affairs" – and Leonard laughs, and the theme music plays, and this is where it begins.
end.
Er - this story has major spoilers for season 4 of Deep Space Nine. I don't know, it's a thing. The episodes they watch are "Body Parts", "Broken Link", "Looking for par'Mach...", and "The Begotten", in case anyone, ah, cares.
Fic:: Looking For par'Mach In All The Wrong Places
by Raven
7000w, The Big Bang Theory, Penny/Leonard/Sheldon. Penny has started taking relationship advice from Star Trek. Things can only get better from here.
At eleven o'clock on a Friday night, curled up on the couch next to a giant bowl of popcorn, Penny comes to two important realisations in quick succession. Firstly, that Leonard - who is on the couch on the other side of the giant bowl of popcorn, with his hand outstretched halfway towards it as though he's forgotten entirely where he is and what he's doing - isn't angry, but unhappy; and secondly, something she's been dreading for years has finally happened.
"Oh, hey," Leonard says, softly, coming back to himself at the sound of the Deep Space Nine theme and going for the bowl, "I love this one. It's the one with the shuttle accident, and Bashir has to..."
"Shut up!" Penny waves a finger. "You're gonna be all, and then there's a shuttle accident, and then Bashir gets swapped with his counterpart from an evil alternate universe and Quark starts a Zumba class and then the Dominion attacks with hummus, and I'm like, I was gonna watch that."
"I didn't say anything!" Leonard lifts his hands in supplication. "For the record, none of those things happen." He glances up at her through his lashes. "Well, maybe."
Penny rolls her eyes, hits pause and gets up to fetch another beer. "You want one?"
"Thanks." Leonard flips over the DVD case, still with the plastic hanging off it. "I didn't know you liked this show. We have it too, you could have borrowed it."
"I could have," Penny says, "and you would have talked about, I don't know, ship classes and continuity errors and, you know, nerd stuff. Not about, say, how hot Alexander Siddig is."
Leonard inclines his head at the TV. "He was," he allows. "I don't know, maybe he hasn't aged well."
"Maybe," Penny says, and before she hits play again, asks: "Are you ever going home?"
"No," Leonard says, calmly. "If you kick me out, I'll sleep in my lab."
He really will, Penny realises; it's not some kind of ploy for her to let him stay. He's not even looking at her, searching for something – presumably contemporary pictures of Alexander Siddig – on his phone.
"Hell," Penny says, out loud, "it's not like you take up much space." Leonard looks up, a little startled, and she ruffles his hair instinctively. She presses play, and they both watch Quark and Rom arguing on screen. Quark thinks he's dying and Rom is kind of sad and kind of happy he's going to inherit Quark's bar and it's all very fraught but at least, Penny thinks, they talk about their feelings.
"What was the fight about, Leonard?" she asks, very softly, but Leonard doesn't answer.
Sheldon doesn't, either, when she asks him.
"I have a ghost in my apartment," she says, spotting him in the corner of the laundry room hefting his basket of clothes, and he raises an eyebrow at her.
"There's no such thing."
He's looking for fabric softener. Penny stamps her foot. "What, no ten-minute lecture on the history of alleged paranormal activity in the United States? What is wrong with you both?"
Sheldon looks at her, and then behind him. "I'm the only other person here."
"Let's pretend," Penny says, exasperated, and – she admits it – a little amused, "I just said, Sheldon, do you have to take everything I say literally, and you said, yes, and I said, I asked for that, huh, and move on."
"That's acceptable."
"I don't care, honey. What is wrong with you and Leonard? What did you two fight about?"
Sheldon doesn't answer. He starts unloading clothes from his basket to put them in a washer, but not accurately, so they fall to the floor in between and he has to lean down and pick them up, and put them back in the basket, and try again, and drop them again. Penny has a sudden feeling that she's witnessing the first scene of a Hallmark movie. "Okay, Sheldon," she says, lifting a hand so he has to pay attention to her and the whole awful laundry thing can't start up again. "Let's try this from the top. I have a ghost in my apartment."
"There's no such thing."
It's precisely the same inflection as last time. Penny marvels. "Oh, but I do," she says, waving a hand. "His name is Leonard Hofstadter."
Sheldon just looks at her.
"He's living in my apartment," Penny clarifies, "but working nights. Some sciency tech thing." She knows perfectly well that it's to do with supercomputer time being easier to access at night, but it's fun to see Sheldon's left eyebrow twitch. "So he's only there when I'm not."
She'd expected it to be, if not creepy, at least a little strange, but it isn't, not at all. Leonard tidies up after himself, leaves her little notes on the refrigerator. Last night she got home from work, tossed her keys on the side and found a cup of coffee on the table just where her hand would reach for it, sweetened right and still hot.
"He says," Penny says, finally, when it looks like Sheldon isn't going to say anything again ever, "that he's not going back. What happened between you two?"
Sheldon says, after a moment, looking down into the washer, "I don't know."
"Huh." Penny sits down on the floor of the laundry room next to him. "Don't hear that much, from you."
"Perhaps," Sheldon says, almost-but-not-quite slipping down to sit beside her, "I breached an unspoken social convention."
"Yeah, but Leonard doesn't usually…" She stops, gestures at random. "Tell me the whole thing, okay?"
"There is nothing to tell." Sheldon sounds frustrated but also inarticulate, which is kind of worrying. Kind of unprecedented, actually. "Leonard and I were talking about..."
A long pause, while something drips and Sheldon just stares at the floor mutely.
"Star Trek?" Penny tries. "Thai food? Who drank all the orange juice?"
"Bose-Einstein condensates."
"Obviously. Go on."
"Our discussion concluded civilly. He went to take a shower. I heard the water running, then I heard it stop. I gathered he took several minutes to find his glasses. He got dressed. He went across the hallway. You likely have a better understanding of what transpired next than I."
"That's it?" Penny asks, when he doesn't say anything else – what transpired next was Leonard walking into Penny's apartment, asking to sleep on the couch and getting distracted by Alexander Siddig's beautiful face – and Sheldon just nods. This doesn't explain, Penny's thinking, why she has an experimental physicist haunting her apartment, nor why she's sitting on her ass on a cold laundry room floor surrounded by Sheldon's clothes, or basically anything. Somehow not a whole lot about her life makes sense right now.
Sheldon says, suddenly: "You were watching Deep Space Nine."
"How'd you know?"
"The theme music," Sheldon says. "He likes Babylon 5 better."
Maybe he does, Penny thinks, but in that case, he likes Babylon 5 a whole lot.
"And then," Penny says, outraged, "it turns out Kira is having Chief O'Brien's baby! I mean – I missed one episode. One. That's why I got the stupid DVDs. Not because I'm – like, you know. I just, it was on in reruns when I got home, and then I had to do the late shift that one night and I just…"
Bernadette seems to be finding it difficult to breathe.
"What's so funny?" Penny demands, but she knows. She knows perfectly well. She puts two slices of cheesecake on a plate and then on a tray and stomps off to the table by the window, and then when she comes back Bernadette can just about talk again.
"I'm sorry, honey," she says, wiping her eyes, "but you just – you've been living across from those guys too long."
"Yeah, I know," Penny says, "I know." In a different tone, she adds: "I guess, you don't…"
"Hey, I love that show." Bernadette starts loading up the next tray. "I watched it in high school." She smiles, apparently at the memory. "I squeezed it in between AP Biology and cheerleading practice, I was kind of an overscheduled kid. If you want I'll come over sometime, we can watch it together."
For a moment, Penny imagines Bernadette in high school, waving pom-poms by day and watching Star Trek by night, giggly and nerdy and smart. It's a nice thought. "That'd be cool," Penny says, and means it.
Later, when they've closed up and they're wiping down the tables, Bernadette asks, "Why didn't you borrow the DVDs from Leonard? Or go over and watch it with them?"
Penny realises, suddenly, that if Bernadette doesn't know, then Wolowitz doesn't know. And that means Leonard and Sheldon aren't talking, not just to her and each other, but to anyone. "They – kind of had a fight," she says, tentatively. "I mean, maybe? Leonard has kind of moved in with me."
"Kind of?" Bernadette repeats, sceptically. "Leonard's living with you? Were you going to mention that, like, any time soon?"
"It's not a big deal," Penny says, firmly, because it's not. It's just Leonard. That night she finds one of his notes on the couch (got more coffee, will pick up milk), flips it over and writes: sleep in the bed, I don't mind. At first she thinks he goes on sleeping on the couch anyway, because the bed is neat and made when she comes to get in it, but then she remembers how he sleeps, curled up tight beneath the covers, and when she snuggles down she can feel the warmth he left behind, lingering between the sheets.
On Tuesday night Sheldon comes in to the Cheesecake Factory to eat and something inside Penny finally snaps. Raj and Howard are around, they order what they usually order, they're talking about Hellblazer or something – or something, Penny thinks, resignedly; she bought the stupid comic for her stupid nephew and now she has John Constantine slash in her browser history – and then when they've eaten they both head home. Sheldon gets up slowly, looks around him as though he doesn’t know what to do with himself now, and although he walks with perfect precision of movement to the door, Penny is thinking suddenly of Leonard sitting on her couch with his hand outstretched towards the popcorn, halfway between somewhere and nowhere.
"Oh, God," Penny says, to Bernadette, "it's like Bambi after his mother died" – and then stops and adds, "Can you cover me for an hour? Please – I'll make it up to you."
"Run, Thumper, run," Bernadette says, and Penny does actually run – because if she leaves work an hour early, she'll make it home before Leonard leaves to go hide out in his lab. She crashes through her apartment door shouting, "Leonard, wake up – shit, what the hell are you doing?"
"Ah!" Leonard jerks back, startled, hits his head on the window sash and ends up sprawled and barefoot on the floor. "Ah, hi. You're back early."
Penny stands over him with her hands on her hips and considers just picking him up and throwing him straight out of the open window. "Oh my God, are you trying to get yourself killed?"
Leonard blinks. "We're on the fourth floor. I'd only get myself maimed."
"Because, yes, Leonard, that is so the take-home message here!" she yells. "What were you doing?"
"Ah, looking at the moon," he says, half-sitting up with his arm over his eyes, "which I can explain, ah, could you, um, could you stop yelling." He gets himself to his feet, perches under the window and half-hangs out again, still kind of perilously in Penny's opinion, but at least he's looking up and not down. "The moon. Maybe we could see it better somewhere else?"
They could see it better from apartment 4A, which has windows that face the other direction, but neither of them mentions that. They end up on the roof, sitting in folding chairs one of the other tenants left out, looking up at the clear California sky. "See," Leonard says, pointing up at the low, heavy crescent moon. "Can you see, where the rest of the disc should be…"
Penny takes a second, but she makes it out: the other half of the moon shining faint grey against the sky.
"Earthlight," Leonard says, softly. "It's the reflected light from the Earth – albedo, that's called, but I hate that word – that shows it up like that. I like it."
"You're right," Penny says, after a moment of silence. "It's pretty."
She leans over and puts her head on his shoulder; he turns and kisses her hair. It ought to be weird, Penny thinks, but it feels natural. They sit like that for a little while, close and quiet, and she realises it's because they've been closer than this, all week: they've been occupying the same space, breathing the same air.
"Leonard," she says, very gently, "what the hell happened between you and Sheldon?"
Leonard takes a very long time to answer. When he does he stands up, paces up and down underneath that clear sky. "I slipped," he says, finally.
Penny blinks. "Once more, with clarity."
"In the shower." Leonard takes his glasses off and polishes them on his sleeve. "My feet were wet, because…"
"Because Sheldon makes you wash them, yeah," Penny says, spreading her palms. "So?"
"So I slipped. I nearly fell and cracked my head open on the tiles. Came this close." Leonard holds up his finger and thumb, an inch apart. "And I thought, what would Sheldon do, if I had? If I'd smashed my head on the hard floor and he heard the noise through the door?"
"So?" Penny's impatient. "What would Sheldon do?"
"Well, that's just it." Leonard is pacing up and down again, turning before he reaches the edge of the room, coming back. "I don't know. I mean - I know what you would do. You just did it."
Penny blinks again, and then realises he means the window: that she pulled him back from the edge when she thought he was going to fall. "That's just – what people do, honey."
"Yeah." Leonard puts his glasses back on and sits down beside her. "And I thought – I literally don't know what Sheldon would do, if he found me like that. If he'd pick me up and take me to the ER or run a study on the rate of blood loss in the adult male human. And in the meantime my life is slipping away." Another gesture: a helpless, expansive wave at the view of rooftops. "The only life I will have is slipping away in foot-washing, molecularly precise gift-giving, the Babylon 5 embargo and Anything-Can-Happen Thursday. Why can't things happen every day?"
"Leonard," Penny says, and breathes in, and wishes this was still five minutes ago; she thinks she and Leonard communicate best in the quiet spaces. "Sweetie. You can't live with me forever."
"I know," Leonard mutters, "and I'm really grateful you…"
"Leonard, are you listening to me?" Penny stands up and takes both of his hands. "You can't live with me forever. Go downstairs and get your laptop and go on Craigslist. Find another place to live. Tell Sheldon he needs to find another roommate. Stop hanging out with him and me. Go. Leave. I'm giving you permission. Make things happen."
Leonard freezes. She feels the tension enter his fingers clasped in hers, and then all the lines of his body. He's looking at her with something like fear in his eyes. "Now?"
"What are you waiting for?" She gives him a little shake. "Thursday?"
"No," he says, half-choked, and Penny can't decide if she wants to shake him some more or pull him in and hug him. She settles on gripping his hand and pulling him to the roof door and down the stairs. Round and round they go, with him trailing behind her, until they reach the door to 4A and barge in without knocking.
Sheldon jumps off the couch in surprise. "Penny! What are you – Leonard?"
After a minute, Leonard steps out from behind Penny. "Hi, Sheldon."
"Leonard," Sheldon says again, sounding lost and confused, "you…"
"Sheldon!" Penny interrupts, stepping forwards. "Let's play hypotheticals. What would you do, if – let's pick an example completely at random – you heard a thump from the bathroom, and you went in and found Leonard had fallen and hit his head on the tiles?"
Something of the confidence has come back into Sheldon's expression: this sort of thing, he understands. "Isn't it obvious?"
"No," Leonard says, tiredly; Penny moves back a step, close enough to hear the rise in pitch of his breathing.
Sheldon glances from one of them to the other. "I'd go get Penny."
"Why?" Leonard asks sharply.
Sheldon raises both eyebrows this time: to him, this really is obvious. "Because she'd know what to do. And she can drive."
"Oh," Leonard says, sitting down abruptly on the arm of the couch, "well, then" – and he is kind of laughing at that, though Penny can hear the note of hysteria in it.
Sheldon's looking at him, then at Penny, then back again. "Leonard, what's this all about?"
Penny says, "Because the two of you can't talk to each other like adults, Leonard has spent the entire week wondering if he should leave you because he doesn't know if you care about him at all" – and that might have been an unfortunate choice of phrasing, though actually, not so much.
"Leaving?" Leonard and Sheldon say together, in very different tones: Leonard, because the idea of him leaving, and Sheldon, and leaving Sheldon, have clearly never all come together for him in precisely the right order before, and Sheldon, because he's looking at Leonard and the open space of this apartment like it just doesn't compute, like what's coming together for Leonard is what he can't take apart.
"Leaving," Leonard mutters again, and looking up to meet Sheldon's eyes on him, "Sheldon, I wasn't going to, I couldn't, I can't…" – and Penny realises, at least five minutes after she should have done, what's about to happen and how she should be elsewhere, that she can't just stand here and witness something like this happening for the first time in the middle of their living room.
But then Sheldon sits down on the couch next to Leonard and pulls him down, his hands threading through Leonard's hair, and Penny turns away, literally spins on her heel, but not so quickly that she doesn't see Leonard's head drop to Sheldon's shoulder, and hear him breathe out, and settle into that hold. She goes straight to the door and pulls it closed behind her and stands in the hallway for a few minutes, partly to pull herself together and partly – to be honest – to listen for sounds from inside. She hears Leonard saying something and Sheldon's quick, curt response, and Leonard laughing, and after that it's silent, like two people are carefully not saying anything, and she goes into her own apartment and slams the door.
She's making hot chocolate and digging through the freezer for ice-cream, wondering why her apartment is chilled and then closing the wide-open window, when Leonard appears in the doorway, taking small steps inside. He looks dishevelled and his eyes are red-rimmed, but he's smiling as he reaches out towards her. "Penny," he says, very softly, "we're watching Deep Space Nine. Come join us."
Penny wants to say something like, you two just upended your entire relationship and kind of maybe agreed to stick around in each other's lives forever, but you did it in time for Star Trek, but she doesn't. She puts her keys back into her bag and follows him. Inside Leonard and Sheldon's apartment it's quiet and warm as it always is, and while she settles on the couch and pulls a blanket over her knees, Sheldon finds the DVD and puts it in the drive. He comes back to sit down on his spot, with Leonard leaning up against him. Penny takes a moment to look at them – Sheldon seems calm as always, though a little flushed; Leonard is soft-eyed and relaxed – and puts her arm around them both.
"I like this one," Leonard says, looking up, "it's the one where Odo gets sick, and then they go to the Gamma Quadrant, and Garak…"
"Shut up," Penny tells him, and leans her head on his shoulder again. Maybe they just upended everything and put it all back where it was. Maybe that's okay.
It's a great story to dine out on for a couple of days. Bernadette squeals and says she knew it all along and Stuart down at the comic book store starts laughing the laugh of the vindicated man, and then, when they get to him, Penny never thought she'd see Howard Wolowitz speechless. "Leonard, and Sheldon," he says after a while, "Leonard, and Sheldon" – and then he kind of gets stuck again; Raj pats him on the back comfortingly and smiles ruefully up at Penny. "I just," Wolowitz is saying, "I thought. Sheldon isn't… like, he doesn't even like…"
He makes an obscene, very evocative gesture. Penny rolls her eyes. "It's not like that. At least, I think," she amends. She admits, privately, that she doesn't know; what Sheldon's deal is, and what Leonard thinks about it. She guesses it's none of her business. "But it's – it's the real thing."
Bernadette and Raj sigh happily at that; Howard looks like his omelette just spat at him, which is to say, not offended, but surprised. Penny laughs and goes to get the drinks they ordered. When her shift ends, Bernadette comes home with Penny and they pick up a bottle of wine on the way. Penny has borrowed season 5 of Deep Space Nine from Leonard and Sheldon and she's almost resigned to the fact she's genuinely excited about what happens next. Bernadette makes popcorn and they eat it and drink wine and get through a couple of episodes without talking a whole lot, though she gasps and laughs and sighs in the right places.
"Time for one more," Bernadette says, finally, as it's getting pretty late. "It's a good one, though" – and she presses play, and Penny, drifting a little on a white-wine cloud, sits up and pays attention. It's fun, it makes her laugh. Quark's in love with a Klingon who's also his ex-wife – it's a long story – and Dax and Worf are dancing around each other, closer and closer, and Penny stuffs popcorn in her mouth: she loves a good romance. And Kira is having Miles O'Brien's baby, which isn't nearly as scandalous as it sounds, she's the surrogate, and he and Kira and Miles's wife Keiko all get along fine, only, Kira is sort of falling for him, and he for her, and it's really awkward, because he's married, he loves Keiko, and Penny is crying into her wineglass and Bernadette is laughing a little at first, but then putting an arm around her, and saying, "Shh, honey, it's okay, it's okay."
"It's so stupid," Penny says, waving her glass at the screen, "they love each other, and Kira, she loves them too, they should just…"
Bernadette says, "Honey, it's okay."
"It's not," Penny says, "it's stupid, it's so stupid, it's the worst."
And because it's stupid – because Penny may have discovered her inner nerd, and she may be genuinely worried about Kira Nerys's emotional well-being right now, but there's got to be a line: this far, and no further – she stands up and puts the empty popcorn bowl in the sink and says, "I should change my sheets."
Bernadette says nothing, gathering up the empty bottle and putting it in the recycling, and rinsing out the glasses.
"I should, I should," Penny's saying, "give them back their DVDs, and…"
"And?" Bernadette says, softly.
"And," Penny says, waving a hand; she doesn't know what else. "And – something."
Bernadette is silent for a long time, and Penny remembers out of nowhere that Bernadette, who is standing with the water running over her hands with an odd stillness about her, isn't just kind, and good company: she's smart. Not the smartest person Penny knows, but that bar's been getting higher recently. "What you told me, the other night," Bernadette says, at last. "About Leonard and Sheldon, after you came down from the roof."
"Yeah," Penny says. She's feeling tired now, and drunk, and a little ashamed of herself, although what for, she's not sure. She flumps back down on the couch, saying, "I told you – well. It was…" She can't think of the word for what it was. "It was… well."
"And afterwards," Bernadette says, thoughtfully, switching off the faucet, "they asked you in."
Penny, who's drifting tipsily off on the back of the couch, sits up sharply. "What does that mean?"
"I don't know," Bernadette says. "Why don't you find out?"
Penny can't just go over there and ask. Nor can she, though she does consider it, watch something like eighteen episodes of Deep Space Nine in one day so she has an excuse to go over and borrow the next season. In the end she just pours the milk down the sink and goes across the hall.
"In the refrigerator," Sheldon says, absently, when she goes in and asks for it. Leonard isn't immediately around, though she can hear someone else moving in the apartment and figures he's in his room. Sheldon seems engrossed in something – he's writing something on a flipchart – and barely notices Penny taking the milk out of the refrigerator door. She considers licking all the fruit while he's not looking but then decides that would be cruel.
"You'll be pleased to hear," she says, going through the cupboards for good measure – they're bound to have Pop Tarts, and she has nothing for tomorrow's breakfast – "that I no longer have a ghost in my apartment."
Sheldon looks at her impassively. "Have you stopped kicking your cat?"
"Have I…" – Penny waves her hands around. "Okay, what the hell is this about, now?"
Sheldon methodically writes another line on his flipchart before answering. "It's a question," he says, very seriously, "that appears superficially comprehensible but actually has no basis in logic. You do not have a cat, and even if you did, you would not – at least I presume you wouldn't, who even knows why anyone does anything – kick it. Similarly, Leonard…"
"Leonard!" Penny says, seizing on that gratefully. "Let's talk about Leonard. Are you happy?"
"Am I happy?" Sheldon's eyes narrow. "I thought we were talking about Leonard."
"Okay, I guess we're talking about you." Penny leans back against the countertop. "Are you?"
"Am I what?"
"Happy!" Penny yells out, and why the hell not, because it's a valid question and not one, in Penny's opinion, that people ask of themselves and others enough. "Are you happy?"
"Yes," Sheldon says. He says it perfectly expressionlessly, crossing out a line and adding something beneath. Penny shakes her head, smiling, and Leonard comes out into the living room, holding a plastic box.
"What's all the yelling about? Hey, Penny." Leonard sits down on the couch and says, "Where were we? Oh, yes, J. Michael Strazynski."
"Oh, my God," Penny says, "you're really doing this." She gestures to Sheldon's flipchart, and Leonard's expectant expression. "I should have figured," she adds, after a moment. "I mean, the Roommate Agreement was… but this…"
"It's actually," Leonard says, and he might be blushing a little, "quite a lot simpler this time around. Sheldon, listen to me. Babylon 5 is – you're not giving it a chance."
"The opening voiceover is stupid," Penny tells him, and then watches sadly as her inner nerd cheerfully gets out of the smouldering remains of her inner closet and goes cavorting into the sunset. Or to Comic-Con. Whatever.
"I admit that," Leonard says, after giving her a startled glance. "But" – he's putting the DVD in as he says it – "it gets better. At first it's – kind of ponderous, and slow, and the acting is really, really" – he cringes – "really bad."
"It was the dawn of the Third Age of mankind," says the portentous voice on the screen, "ten years after the Earth-Minbari war…"
For possibly the first time ever, Sheldon and Penny exchange understanding glances. Leonard, who is sitting cross-legged on the couch and gesturing while he's talking, doesn't notice. "You just have to stick with it," he says, hitting pause, "just keep going, and it's not like it gets good and you don't notice, though that does happen, it's just, with the commitment you put into it, you start finding that it means something. I know you don't like it, Sheldon, and you don't have to – it's just, I do. I do, and I can't…"
"Wait," Penny says, as he falls silent, "have you, all this time, I mean, was that always a metaphor for sex, oh, my God. "
"What?" Leonard says, and then blinks twice, drops to the couch and puts his head in his hands. "Oh… no. No, no. "
Penny thinks she may, possibly, be a little in love with him.
After that, there only seems to be one more option.
"Sheldon," Penny says, making a decision, "I'm going to pick Leonard up in a second and make out with him on the couch. Do you mind?"
After a second during which a lot of mental cogs seem to be turning, Sheldon shakes his head.
"Leonard, do you?"
"Hey," Leonard's saying, "how come you asked him first" – but he's shaking his head while he says it, so Penny gets up, puts her arms around him, pulls him up to standing sharply enough for his feet to leave the ground for a moment, kisses him for a long and beautiful minute and then pushes him down onto the cushions. He closes his eyes and she takes her time over it. They've had so many first kisses, and last kisses, and ones in between, but this one – Penny's conscious of Sheldon's presence, his eyes on her from where he's standing by the kitchen counter – this one is a different kind of in between.
"Ah," Leonard says, when she pulls back and he's collected his wits enough to talk again, "what is, what is happening to me right now?"
Penny hesitates, then throws it in. "Looking For par'Mach In All The Wrong Places."
There's a long pause.
"I'm assuming," Leonard says, and it's kind of obscene that his voice is quite so level, when he's lying there with his eyes half-closed and his hands above his head, "that no one is a Klingon in this scenario."
"Yeah, no," Penny says, firmly. "No Klingons. No death."
From behind her, Sheldon says, "But they didn't…"
"But we can," Leonard says, with understanding, and he looks – happy. Like he's solved a problem after years of trying; like now, finally, x equals something real. "We can."
"Yes," Penny says, and she's smiling back. She leans down and kisses him again, he makes a small, helpless noise and she can't help herself: she gets down on her knees in front of the couch and leans forwards. For a moment, his wrists are back above his head, pinned down under her hands, and Penny has a sudden delicious shiver at the thought of what else might have gone into the new improved agreement. He looks up at her with his eyes wide and his lips parted and she gets on top of him on the couch, so their bodies pressed together and she can feel his body heat through his clothes. She needs a moment: she's just lying there with her feet on the end of the couch so it's taking some of her weight off Leonard, though not a lot, judging from the pitch of his breathing.
"Hey," he says, after a second, pushing himself up on his elbows, "you okay?"
"Yeah," she says, still taking her moment, breathing in the scent of him, which is mostly dusty old textbooks and soap, but with the visceral familiarity of her own sheets. "It's just – sudden. You know." After another moment, she moves slightly sideways and adds, "Shit, Leonard, you walked out on Sheldon and straight into my bed, didn't you realise…"
"I should have," he murmurs, his body arching off the couch to meet hers, "I should have, my mother always said I had the self-awareness of a pond snail…"
She laughs, pushes herself back on him, going for the friction, smiling as he trails off, his eyes going glassy as he loses track of what he was saying.
"Leonard was in your bed?" Sheldon asks. He doesn't sound jealous, just interested. The sound of his voice brings Penny back to the fact that he's there, and from the speed at which Leonard's head turns, it's had the same effect on him.
"Uh, yeah," Penny says, sitting up, ignoring Leonard breathing out with a huff as she accidentally forces the air out of his lungs. "When he was working nights, he was sleeping in my bed in the day."
"Oh," Sheldon says. "You weren't…"
"Well," Leonard says, "we might. Now."
"Now?" Sheldon says, alarmed.
"Well," Penny says, "not right now" – ignoring the disappointment creasing Leonard's features – "and oh, this is going to start getting awkward, isn't it." Awkward, maybe, soon won't cut it: it might have to be weird and, and, freaky. She's still half-lying on Leonard, his hair standing on end and mouth bruised where her lips have been, and Sheldon is just sort of sitting there with his eyes wide in witness.
"Oh," Leonard says, "oh. Yeah."
Sheldon, though, isn't fazed, and why would he be. He gets off the stool he was sitting on and stretches out, walks across casually as a cat like this is something he does all the time. "We were drafting an agreement," he says, lightly, reaching for his pen, "I see it's going to need several more sections."
"An agreement," Penny says, a little wildly, and then: "Why not. Okay. An agreement." She gives Leonard a kiss before she stands up. "Why the hell not."
Leonard rolls over, lands on his ass on the floor next to the couch and says, "What do we do now?"
Penny says, with more confidence this time, "We work it out."
"A three-body problem," Leonard says, still sitting on the floor, and laughs. "Like a triple star. Or the moon, the Earth and the sun."
All reflecting off one another, Penny thinks as she walks across to join Sheldon, and smiles. Because if this is it – if this is what embracing her inner nerd is all about, all carefully-delineated boundaries and stories about space stations and the other two souls haunting her apartment and yes, her life – well, that's fine. That's fine.
She's still not owning up to Hellblazer porn. Or the thing about Bert and Ernie.
It's a long, complicated night. It involves quite a lot of walking around, gesturing at flipcharts and yelling, and Penny and Leonard ganging up on Sheldon and she and Sheldon ganging up on Leonard. (They try to gang up on her a couple of times, but it doesn't work so well.) Late in the evening, she takes some time and goes back to her own apartment, makes the hot chocolate she came to borrow the milk for. She walks around her own space, her own things, her own life, knowing that Leonard is watching over Sheldon and that Leonard, who needs so much, sometimes, knows that he's needed, and that sometimes, not all the time, they can be enough for each other. When she goes back she makes them both taste the hot chocolate, Sheldon out of the cup and Leonard out of her mouth, and that one is yet another different kind of first kiss, but, she thinks, a good one. And although Sheldon has an odd shyness in him right now, something she thinks will pass with time and space, she sees what happens next because she's looking for it: his hands gripping Leonard's as he moves to wash the cup.
"I'll do it," Leonard murmurs, leaning over to take the cup from him, and Penny's close enough to see the very quick kiss Sheldon leaves on the top of Leonard's head, and then the look he gives her straight after, a little defiant, but mostly soft and sweet.
"One last thing," Penny says. It's not actually the last thing: at the end of this night, she's going to go home to her own bed, and she's going to take Leonard with her, and she's going to take his glasses off, tenderly, and lay him out, and exorcise the ghosts of doubt and poor communication skills out of her mattress. She's wondering if she should ask for Sheldon's permission in Leonard's earshot: she rather thinks she will. It's in the agreement, and she'll enjoy the hectic flush that will come to his cheeks, and the small, helpless smile. But before that, something else: something else with all three. "Leonard, take Babylon 5 out of the fucking DVD player."
Sheldon laughs at that, a real laugh, though subdued and a little rusty, and they end up on the couch, all of them, watching the episode of Deep Space Nine where Kira Nerys finally has her baby.
"That's it?" Penny asks, at the end, while texting Bernadette; the reply comes less than five seconds later and it's all in caps. "She has the baby and goes back to her boyfriend – who, by the way, is stupid and boring, shut up Shakaar everyone hates you. Everything goes back to normal at the end?"
"They do name the baby after her," Leonard says thoughtfully, and Sheldon hums agreement so Penny can feel the vibration as well as hear it. "It's kind of sweet. Kirayoshi O'Brien."
"Kirayoshi O'Brien," Penny says. "Okay, that's okay. I still think they should have…" She waves a hand to indicate herself, Leonard and Sheldon. "It would be better."
"Yes," Sheldon says, clipped, "a far superior state of affairs" – and Leonard laughs, and the theme music plays, and this is where it begins.
end.
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on 2014-09-03 12:11 am (UTC)no subject
on 2014-09-03 01:51 am (UTC)no subject
on 2014-09-03 07:50 am (UTC)no subject
on 2014-09-03 09:48 am (UTC)no subject
on 2014-09-03 09:48 am (UTC)no subject
on 2014-09-03 10:03 am (UTC)no subject
on 2014-09-03 10:44 am (UTC)no subject
on 2014-09-03 12:29 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2014-09-03 09:49 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2014-09-03 09:55 pm (UTC)no subject
on 2014-09-03 10:08 pm (UTC)So yes. This OT3 universe of yours is the best. I'd like to see millions more words of negotiation and communication and Penny being amazing and Sheldon's Agreement.
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on 2014-09-03 10:21 pm (UTC)ANYWAY OT3 FOREVER lalalalala. <3 <3
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on 2014-09-03 04:27 pm (UTC)Just FYI. :D How do you do that?
(This was also a particularly cool and interesting read given, uh, certain resonances with my own personal life right now.)
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on 2014-09-03 04:56 pm (UTC)(And, ALSO, your parenthesis intrigues me. <3 <3)