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[big bang theory] if i'm not the same - pg-13
Title: If I'm Not The Same
Rating: up to PG-13 for language
Length: 4600 words
Fandom: Big Bang Theory
Prompt: Uses the third fifteen prompts in order from the 2010 Paradox-o-rama Fiction Friday thing at![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
sheldon_penny, the link to which I lost long ago.
A/N: Supposed to be an AMNESTY FIC in a shameless copying of![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
damalur but idk, somehow I finished them instead. These are all one-year-later continuations of the AUs in Through the Looking Glass and If It Was So from long-forgotten picture prompts at sheldon_penny. As done as they'll ever get, I guess. iii from all three collections obviously got re-used in Get Rid of Me If You Try!
Read the whole thing on AO3
i. a year after the roller coasters
"Fore!"
Penny cringed as Hannah took another choppy swing at the ball. A divot of turf flew up in the air, then came to rest next to a number of similar lumps of grass and dirt.
"Well, shoot." Hannah propped her hands on her hips and surveyed the evidence of her terrible swing. "I think this club is too long for me or something."
Shelly un- and re-fastened the velcro straps on her gloves for at least the twentieth time. "I'd put my money on your inability to calculate the proper arc needed to make contact at the bottom of your swing."
Hannah's face screwed up. "I know how to calculate that, okay? I am an engineer, for God's sake."
"Barely," Shelly sniffed.
Penny threw herself between them before they could start another of their embarrassingly stereotypical fights — honestly, she'd never known a single other girl in the entire world who pulled as much hair as Shelly Leigh Cooper, unless it was Hannah Wolowitz.
"Okay," she said, one hand grabbing Shelly's and squeezing while the other waved vaguely toward the left of the green. "Hannah, why don't you take a few practice swings over there and I'll go ahead and take my turn now."
"You can't—"
"I can, and I'm going to," she interrupted. "We'll follow all the rules once the tournament starts, but for now we'll just take it easy, okay? It's not life or death."
Shelly's hand tightened under hers. Penny wouldn't swear to it but it almost looked like her eyes were rolling, showing the whites like a horse about to bolt. "Not life or death? You don't know that! We can't take it easy! It's a pro-am tournament, Penny. I'm going to have to face Wil Wheaton."
ii. a year after the parade
The sheets were scratchy, smelled more of dust than fabric softener, and under any other circumstances would have sent Penny screaming for the nearest laundry room. After nine hours in the car with a restless six year old, a squalling ten month old, and a whiny thirty year old husband, though, she snuggled deeper into the thin mattress with something like a sigh of pleasure. They were supposed to push on for another hour or two before stopping, but she was ready to kick her entire family out on the side of the road and head for Mexico. They had great margaritas at the tourist traps just over the border, she'd heard.
"I don't even want to hear about getting back on the road until at least ten tomorrow," she warned Cooper.
"It's barely six o'clock. What are we supposed to do for sixteen hours in the middle of nowhere?"
As heavenly as it felt to finally be resting on something other than her aching ass, the pressure in her boobs was starting to get painful. It was almost time to feed the baby but she was sleeping quietly for the first time in hours. Unlike her sister, blessed baby that Georgia had been when viewed in the giant blind spot of hindsight, riding in the car was an affront to Leia's very being, and no amount of dollies or binkies or mashed bananas could soothe her.
Penny carefully lifted her head to check on her. It wasn't that she believed Leia could read her mind, but sometimes Penny wondered if she got a sadistic, un-baby-like pleasure from doing exactly what Penny was hoping she wouldn't. Leia was still sleeping though, tucked in the portable crib Cooper's stepdad had made for them before Georgia made her first appearance.
And, oh bless, the breast pump bag was already waiting for her on top of the in-room fridge.
She turned over, gingerly, to find Cooper unpacking their overnight bag on the other bed. Penny reached out and tugged at the hem of his plaid shorts. "Why don't you take Georgia down to see what that giant head was? Could be some kind of dinosaur park or something. Maybe there's a museum. You can pick up McDonald's on the way back."
Georgia looked away from the TV with a huge grin and rolled back on the bed, kicking her legs in the air. "Yay!" she cheered quietly, throwing her hands up like she was waving at the ceiling. Penny tried to pretend it was the museum that got that reaction and not the Golden Arches.
"Not like to be worth the price of admission, I bet," Cooper complained.
He turned to put something on the dresser between the beds. Penny curved her hand around the back of his knee.
"Make it worth your while," she offered with an exaggerated wink.
"You're going to drive some tomorrow?" He paused, considered. "No, you're going to offer to drive some tomorrow, then make me take over again when Leia throws her binky on the floor for the fifth time."
"See?" She pinched him, just a little. "I knew one of you would figure out how to read my mind sooner or later."
iii. a year after the collision
For a few minutes every morning — between the shower that snapped her out of a sleep-fogged daze and stepping out of the bathroom fully dressed for the day — Penny got to look in the mirror and not be surprised by the eyes that looked back. But then she'd have to take that last step of her morning routine and pop in the colored contacts that finished her transformation from Starving Actress (On the Run) to Boring Entry-Level Office Drone (Faking It, and Badly).
This month it was blue eyes. Mousy brown hair. Maybe a little too much time between waxings, if the state of her eyebrows and upper lip were anything to go by.
Bang, bang, bang went the knuckles on the door, right on time.
"Are you ready to go? You need to leave in precisely two minutes in order to get to work by the start of your workday."
"Are you visible yet?" Penny called back. She already knew the answer. It had been almost six weeks since she last heard that hum. Since she felt it raise the hairs on the back of her neck and smelled autumn in the middle of a Florida spring.
They'd found ways around it, mostly, but Penny missed being able to look him in the eye. To watch the way his face changed when she riled him up, or the slight flush that rose up through his neck and face when she forgot for a few hours what a terrible idea it was to get involved with the crazy man who'd ruined her life. She wondered if it was time to make some sort of ultimatum, if reminding him of all the ways visible Sheldon was useful to her would be enough to kick his brain in gear to fix whatever had fritzed out inside the device.
"One minute, forty-five seconds," he said instead of answering. The door creaked open an inch or two, his yellow-gloved fingers coming around the edge like some kind of horror movie villain.
Or Brad Pitt-in-Fight Club, her mind unhelpfully supplied. Wrenching the door open, a panting, half-dressed Penny in the room behind him, Sheldon barking out monosyllabic answers to annoying questions....
Penny swept her hair up in a ponytail, trying to cool down the sudden rush of heat that flooded through her.
Six weeks was an awfully goddamn long time.
iv. a year after the shift change
"Macaroni and cheese."
Penny wrinkled her nose and tossed another cord of wood on the fire. "Seriously? Homemade or Kraft?"
"Shit, girl, are you kidding? I would eat that damn cheese powder dry at this point." Sherry finished cranking the can opener and poured the beans into the cast-iron pot. "What about you? You gotta be prepared in case we wander into civilization tomorrow, you know."
"Yeah, yeah, I know. Um," Penny scratched her chin while she pretended to think.
They'd played the same game every night for as long as she could remember, since she and Sherry had said goodbye to Jorge at the crossroads. But while Sherry's answer changed every day, depending on her mood or the brightness of the moon through the clouds or whatever, Penny cycled through the same list over and over again. In the months they'd been moving through the traveling lands, Penny had honed it down until it was worn smooth in her mind, razor-thin and translucent; the list, like shells too impossibly delicate to survive the journey to a sandy beach, breaking up under the waves and waiting to slice through the tender skin of some tourist's foot.
"I'll start with an appletini," she said. Just the syllables were enough to taste it on her lips and tongue. Tart and sweet and wet. The alcohol that always seemed just a little oily. That burst of sourness on the roof of her mouth.
Tomorrow night, she would remember fajitas. The tortilla, soft and supple; vegetables still sizzling on the plate, bitter char marks criss-crossing the crisp julienned peppers and onions. The vinegary scent of salsa under her nose as she polished off the chip basket, laughing at her appetite, chile seeds burning holes in her tongue.
"And there'd better be a big ol' hunk of Granny Smith floating in that sucker, too," she added, just to hear Sherry's silvery laugh floating up alongside the smoke into the sky.
v. a year after the party
"Saguaro," he said again, with extra emphasis on the wɑroʊ since she hadn't yet said it right.
"Sog-arrow," Jill repeated, as stubborn in her mispronunciation as she was when forced to apologize to her brother. She pointed at the next page. "What's that?"
"That's a burrowing owl," Sheldon read from the caption under the picture.
She slapped a hand to her face and laughed, open-mouthed and loud. "He looks funny! Like Miz Barnett."
While they'd been turning pages in the book, Jill had slowly risen to her knees in her chair. She plopped back down again when Sheldon pressed on the top of her head before she cracked it against his chin.
"What's funny about the way Mrs Barnett looks?" He'd only met the woman once, when the babysitter cancelled with no notice. Penny, trapped at work, had called and all but begged him to pick the kids up from school.
"Her legs are skinnier than all the rest of her. Like a chicken," Jill said. She sounded bored with the very digression she'd introduced to the conversation. Nothing new there; her brain whizzed from one idea to the next at a rate that would have exhausted Sheldon if he weren't intimately familiar with the behavior himself.
At the rate they were going tonight, though, it didn't seem likely the girl would ever focus enough to learn how to read for herself. Smart as the dickens, but without a lick of sense in her whole body, as his mom would, and did, say.
Sheldon turned to the next page, and Jill stopped him with a tiny hand on his wrist. He dutifully turned back to the owl picture and sat back to wait for her next question.
"How does it burrow in the rocks?"
He leaned forward and skimmed the page. The photo showed an owl standing on a grassy rise, soft brown dirt under its talons. But in the paragraph just above it was a sentence about how the birds took advantage of existing structures when the ground was too hard to dig their own.
"I don't know," he hedged, tapping her on the head again when she started to pop out of her seat like a jack-in-the-box. "What do you think?"
Her progress was so frustratingly slow that he wondered if she weren't playing dumb, to still be unable to read so she could stretch out the lessons. He couldn't pretend that he hadn't noticed the way both children kept pushing him in their mother's path. But when he'd said as much, Penny had flushed a soft red and shot the idea down.
Sheldon ignored the twinge of regret the memory of her denial still dredged up.
Jill hummed, drummed a finger against her lips the way her mother did right before she changed the subject. "I bet they steal other people's houses!"
"Jilly!" he gasped in mock disapproval. He let his usual accent lapse into the one he still carried from childhood, the one she and Danny had begged to hear over and over and over again after spending an afternoon glued to a marathon of cheesy old westerns. "You can't just accuse innocent owls of house thievin'."
"But it's right th—" Her eyes went wide, wispy blonde eyebrows disappearing under her bangs as she caught herself about to give away the whole game. She snatched her hand back from where she'd been about to point out the relevant passage in the book.
Before Sheldon could respond, Jill hopped down out of her chair and grabbed his hand. She tugged with all her might, trying to drag him along behind her. "I bet Mommy knows. C'mon!"
Mommy probably didn't have any idea there even was such a thing as a burrowing owl, but Sheldon let himself be tugged in her direction anyway.
vi. a year after more than one ending
She finished paying out on the hands at the table and pulled the cards across the felt. The big-bellied woman in the wolf shirt stood, juggling her chips and drink, and thanked her in a voice that probably carried a good two or three tables away.
"Enjoy the rest of your stay, ma'am!" Penny reached out to collect the two chip tip she'd left, and looked up with a smile.
When the woman moved away from the table, parting the crowd around her as she made her way to the bar, Penny froze. Ten seconds later, and she would never have known he was there.
It was Sheldon, standing near the roulette tables, his elbows tucked close against his side as he looked around.
Penny smiled again, and raised her hand to wave and shout his name. Floor rules be damned, personal rules be damned, she hadn't seen him in months, not since the day she told him it was kinder to let themselves go. A sweet curl of joy rose in her chest. Had he come looking for her?
But before she could get his attention, a woman stepped up next to him and wrapped her hand around his skinny bicep. He ducked his head toward her, her frizzy brown hair a perfect complement for his short, smooth hair.
She lost track of them after that, deliberately. Kept her attention trained on her table until someone came to relieve her. She clapped out and signed over her drawer, nodded along with the floorman's end of shift instructions, nodded up at the security camera over the employee exit; she was hyperaware of everything around her but weirdly detached from it, like she was on autopilot the whole time, or watching herself in a dream.
As she ripped off her bowtie and vest and flung them in her locker, she thought maybe it was time she finished running, all the way back to the big empty house still waiting for her outside Omaha.
vii. a year after the accidental date
"Tell you what, I never thought I'd see the day Sheldon actually brought a girl home, let alone one who fits in as good as you."
Penny shifted the giant frozen turkey on her lap. Even wrapped in plastic and paper bags, it was dripping condensation (she hoped) all over her. She smiled at Uncle Badger, as he insisted she call him, or tried to, anyway. He was a little too much like her own uncles for it to be totally unweird. She kept waiting for her aunt Kelly to start screeching from the jumpseat.
"Sorry," she said, feeling her face start to pull into a frown. "He's never brought a girl home before?"
Badger pulled the unlit cigar out of his mouth and guffawed. If he hadn't been trying to steer and shift at the same time, Penny would have bet good money he would have slapped his knee and punched her shoulder, too.
No, wait, red light. She braced herself against the door as his hand came up to her shoulder.
"That's a good one," he said between chuckles. "Shelly bringing a girl home. No, Pen, you're the first. And damn glad I am, too, lots of girls out there who wouldn't want to spend an afternoon at a turkey shoot with an old goat like me."
It wasn't exactly her idea of a great afternoon either, but Badger was really hard to say no to once he got an idea in his head. And for some reason he'd kept the idea in his head ever since he met her in Pasadena, the night his family had kidnapped her and tried to force-feed her barbecue.
Plus, hello, turkey shoot with prizes? She had plans for this week that didn't involve going with anyone or their mom to pick out their own poultry from a pen.
The stoplight changed and Badger peeled out. Penny braced the turkey against the dash.
"You guys stick around next weekend, you and me'll go down to the bay and do some fishin'. Hell, we'll even take Sheldon!"
viii. a year after the blockbuster
When the job offer finally came, there was nothing for Gilda to say but yes. It made sense, a total feather in her cap and bragging rights besides.
"So, that's it?" Penny said, swallowing down her disappointment. "You're going?"
"Of course I am. What's left for me here?"
Me, Penny wanted to say. Wanted to scream. Stay here with me. For me.
But it wouldn't get her any farther with Gilda than it ever had with Sheldon.
Someday, Penny promised herself, she was going to fall in love with someone who would look up from their work long enough to notice.
ix. a year after the game
The chair felt way more comfortable than Penny thought it had any right to be. A lawyer's office wasn't a place where people were supposed to be comfortable, was it? Well, maybe it was when the office was as fancy as this one. She doubted anyone here had ever had to clean puke out of a carpet or stand next to a client dying slowly from infected track marks, which was all she'd ever known when it came to lawyers.
"Do you understand, ma'am?"
"Oh, sure," she said, even though she didn't. He'd used a lot of words she didn't know. Lots and lots, in fact. Probate sounded dirty but wasn't, apparently. Or else somebody was in for a rude surprise, and for once it wasn't her.
The lawyer smiled and handed her a pen. "Just sign at the blue flags and initial the yellow."
As she flipped each page, he slid them across the desk and made two stacks.
"So, any plans? I know you weren't expecting this, but I bet you've got some ideas."
He sounded as excited for her windfall as she knew she should feel, but when she tried to play along, all she could think of was the doctor in his metal chair. If it weren't for the documents she'd just pretended to understand, she wouldn't even remember his name, let alone his face beyond a blur of sallow skin and thinning hair. Her only clear memory was of the barbecue bacon burger, well-done, and a Coke with two cherries.
That was all she had left, the rest crowded out by the grind of life and death between his last visit to Mac's and now.
x. a year after the sunscreen
The vacation she picked, Penny was proud to say, was everything their trip the year before wasn't. A week at cozy resort in Arizona, surrounded by mountains that turned purple when the sun set. Purification cleanses and mud baths, and the hot waiter in the black polo shirt hanging on their every word at the nightly cocktail hour. It was tranquil and peaceful and relaxing.
And boring as fuck.
"It's Spring Break," Katie whined, flopping face-first onto her pool chaise. "Why aren't we drunk in Acapulco or something? Anything. Jesus."
Lee snorted. "Thanks, but I've had enough holding your hair while you puke on the side of a dirt road for one lifetime."
Penny listened with half an ear, much too busy trying to let go of her surroundings and give herself over to nature to try to mediate another round of the grudge match heading into its third decade
"Oh, for God's sake, you need to get laid."
"Says you."
"Shut up. Who? Waiter Walter?"
Penny cracked an eye open to see Lee cross his arms and smirk.
Katie turned on her back and threw an arm over her eyes. "I hate you."
xi. a year after the last straw
Penny loves Facebook.
In real life, she has two friends. Sure, there are people she's on good terms with at work. There are the dates she goes on to look normal, like she doesn't come home afterward and cry in the shower until she feels hollowed out. She's doing the best job she possibly can to be who everyone expects to see when they look at her.
But when it comes right down to it: she has Leonard, and she has Sheldon.
Online, though. Online she's as popular as Katie— As she always wanted to be. Katie has no place here. Katie, as far as she's concerned, is lying somewhere in a pile of ash. Penny has a lot of friends, tons of Farmville gifts and pokes and birthday wishes. She's a Sagittarius now, and she almost never flinches when she announces it.
Penny also has a short list of news feeds she checks, thanks to the tricks she picked up from some random message board Howard liked. She creeps on the people from home, keeps an eye on her family. Never uses anything that can be traced anywhere between Pasadena and Omaha; she's lonely and homesick, but she's not stupid.
If she feels the phantom weight of a gun in her hand when Sheldon asks why she cares so much about people she's never met, well. That's not something Penny knows anything about, is it?
xii. a year after the trial run
The rooftop was crowded with people, with barely enough room to walk between them, let alone make one's way to the chairs on the far side of the pool where one could sit in peace. Sheldon crossed his arms and glared at the nearest cluster of revelers. Maybe if he concentrated hard enough one or more might move out of his way.
Leonard took another sip of his drink and clenched his teeth. "Could you at least pretend you're not plotting everyone's doom?"
"No."
"Oh, come on!"
"There is absolutely no reason for me to be here, and although it's only barely semantically possible, there is even less reason for me to act friendly while you force me to spend an evening with drunken strangers. How did you even get invited?"
"I didn't, not exactly. And you're going to scare off all the girls!"
Sheldon turned in a circle, hands spread. "Yes, I wouldn't want to frighten off all the viable sexual candidates who are simply flocking to our sides."
But Leonard had stopped paying attention and was smoothing back his hair. Sheldon followed his gaze to see the tall, shapely brunette who'd just stepped out of the stairwell.
"Oh, God," Leonard moaned. "She's here. Oh, God, she's coming over here! Quick, act like I said something funny!"
When Sheldon didn't, he started laughing, high and nervous like a hyena who'd just spotted the lioness on his tail. As the object of his latest infatuation squeezed past them with barely a glance, Sheldon snorted.
"Is it too late to downgrade your 'imaginary future children together' to 'unattainable fantasy children even were she to suffer memory loss and an inexplicable fondness for homunculi'?"
Leonard scowled.
xiii. a year after only one ending
Somewhere, in some other universe, where candy showers are common or the moon sets in the east, there is wind and sun and water and earth. These are here, too, just as always.
In one of those other universes, there are friends sharing a lazy meal and sweet kisses traded under a full moon. There's a hand sliding up the inside of a thigh. Soft whispers loosened in the dark. A rush of breath, shaken and shallow.
But not here. Here, there's no one left to see what remains. There are memories that float through the air, free to travel where they will, with no one left to catch them.
xiv. a year after the team
The ditch where they were waiting for the sign from Raj was rapidly filling with water. Cold water. Cold, muddy rainwater surging toward them from the blacktopped road, with eddies of rainbow oil slick on the surface, and grit that would stick to their skin long after the water dried.
"You know I have a delicate constitution," Sheldon said for at least the fifth time.
Penny ignored him. At least he was holding position, for all his complaining. She lowered her binoculars and gave him a once-over. On his belly in the grass as he was, it was a pretty nice once-over, too. His pants were plastered to his legs from the rain, and his ridiculous rain slicker wasn't enough to make up for the way his pale hands looked against the dark mud.
"You've got the same damn constitution I've got," Penny shot back.
She was every bit as miserable but leaving wasn't an option for either of them. They'd come here to do the job, to help the nice old lady who'd hired them to clear her son's name, and by God, they were going to do the damn job.
She leaned in close and jabbed a finger into Sheldon's shoulder. "Suck. It. Up."
"I still say we could have waited in the truck," he grumbled as he swiped her binoculars and peered across the road.
Penny flopped back down beside him and pulled her hat lower. "If you don't say one more word for the next half hour, I'll buy you the super-sized tub of VapoRub, I swear to God."
xv. a year after the audition
Sheldon keeps promising her that they'll be able to leave soon. Not in so many words, of course. He can't afford to be that sloppy. Neither of them can. But Penny can hear it, in the pauses between words he can't say. She feels it in the press of his lips against hers, so sure and strong.
She doesn't know what he does every day. Doesn't know where he goes. Penny stays in their room until someone comes to get her, and then she sits at her desk until someone takes her back. She learns to type by touch instead of sight. She learns to stop asking question, to stop expecting answers. She remembers to keep her brow smooth and her mouth turned up, and she never, ever forgets.
The food is nothing to write home about — as if she could, even if she wanted to. But she can't feel the hollows between Sheldon's wrist bones anymore, and the weight of him over her is as solid as she's ever felt it. Where once he was slipping away, fading away right in front of her, now he is real and sturdy and present.
Penny wonders how long it will be before Sheldon finally realizes his promises are as empty as the silence that engulfs them.
Rating: up to PG-13 for language
Length: 4600 words
Fandom: Big Bang Theory
Prompt: Uses the third fifteen prompts in order from the 2010 Paradox-o-rama Fiction Friday thing at
sheldon_penny, the link to which I lost long ago. A/N: Supposed to be an AMNESTY FIC in a shameless copying of
damalur but idk, somehow I finished them instead. These are all one-year-later continuations of the AUs in Through the Looking Glass and If It Was So from long-forgotten picture prompts at sheldon_penny. As done as they'll ever get, I guess. iii from all three collections obviously got re-used in Get Rid of Me If You Try! Read the whole thing on AO3
Alice took up the fan and gloves, and, as the hall was very hot,
she kept fanning herself all the time she went on talking: "Dear,
dear! How queer everything is to-day! And yesterday things
went on just as usual. I wonder if I've been changed in the
night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning?
I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. But if I'm
not the same, the next question is, Who in the world am I?
Ah, that's the great puzzle!"
i. a year after the roller coasters
"Fore!"
Penny cringed as Hannah took another choppy swing at the ball. A divot of turf flew up in the air, then came to rest next to a number of similar lumps of grass and dirt.
"Well, shoot." Hannah propped her hands on her hips and surveyed the evidence of her terrible swing. "I think this club is too long for me or something."
Shelly un- and re-fastened the velcro straps on her gloves for at least the twentieth time. "I'd put my money on your inability to calculate the proper arc needed to make contact at the bottom of your swing."
Hannah's face screwed up. "I know how to calculate that, okay? I am an engineer, for God's sake."
"Barely," Shelly sniffed.
Penny threw herself between them before they could start another of their embarrassingly stereotypical fights — honestly, she'd never known a single other girl in the entire world who pulled as much hair as Shelly Leigh Cooper, unless it was Hannah Wolowitz.
"Okay," she said, one hand grabbing Shelly's and squeezing while the other waved vaguely toward the left of the green. "Hannah, why don't you take a few practice swings over there and I'll go ahead and take my turn now."
"You can't—"
"I can, and I'm going to," she interrupted. "We'll follow all the rules once the tournament starts, but for now we'll just take it easy, okay? It's not life or death."
Shelly's hand tightened under hers. Penny wouldn't swear to it but it almost looked like her eyes were rolling, showing the whites like a horse about to bolt. "Not life or death? You don't know that! We can't take it easy! It's a pro-am tournament, Penny. I'm going to have to face Wil Wheaton."
ii. a year after the parade
The sheets were scratchy, smelled more of dust than fabric softener, and under any other circumstances would have sent Penny screaming for the nearest laundry room. After nine hours in the car with a restless six year old, a squalling ten month old, and a whiny thirty year old husband, though, she snuggled deeper into the thin mattress with something like a sigh of pleasure. They were supposed to push on for another hour or two before stopping, but she was ready to kick her entire family out on the side of the road and head for Mexico. They had great margaritas at the tourist traps just over the border, she'd heard.
"I don't even want to hear about getting back on the road until at least ten tomorrow," she warned Cooper.
"It's barely six o'clock. What are we supposed to do for sixteen hours in the middle of nowhere?"
As heavenly as it felt to finally be resting on something other than her aching ass, the pressure in her boobs was starting to get painful. It was almost time to feed the baby but she was sleeping quietly for the first time in hours. Unlike her sister, blessed baby that Georgia had been when viewed in the giant blind spot of hindsight, riding in the car was an affront to Leia's very being, and no amount of dollies or binkies or mashed bananas could soothe her.
Penny carefully lifted her head to check on her. It wasn't that she believed Leia could read her mind, but sometimes Penny wondered if she got a sadistic, un-baby-like pleasure from doing exactly what Penny was hoping she wouldn't. Leia was still sleeping though, tucked in the portable crib Cooper's stepdad had made for them before Georgia made her first appearance.
And, oh bless, the breast pump bag was already waiting for her on top of the in-room fridge.
She turned over, gingerly, to find Cooper unpacking their overnight bag on the other bed. Penny reached out and tugged at the hem of his plaid shorts. "Why don't you take Georgia down to see what that giant head was? Could be some kind of dinosaur park or something. Maybe there's a museum. You can pick up McDonald's on the way back."
Georgia looked away from the TV with a huge grin and rolled back on the bed, kicking her legs in the air. "Yay!" she cheered quietly, throwing her hands up like she was waving at the ceiling. Penny tried to pretend it was the museum that got that reaction and not the Golden Arches.
"Not like to be worth the price of admission, I bet," Cooper complained.
He turned to put something on the dresser between the beds. Penny curved her hand around the back of his knee.
"Make it worth your while," she offered with an exaggerated wink.
"You're going to drive some tomorrow?" He paused, considered. "No, you're going to offer to drive some tomorrow, then make me take over again when Leia throws her binky on the floor for the fifth time."
"See?" She pinched him, just a little. "I knew one of you would figure out how to read my mind sooner or later."
iii. a year after the collision
For a few minutes every morning — between the shower that snapped her out of a sleep-fogged daze and stepping out of the bathroom fully dressed for the day — Penny got to look in the mirror and not be surprised by the eyes that looked back. But then she'd have to take that last step of her morning routine and pop in the colored contacts that finished her transformation from Starving Actress (On the Run) to Boring Entry-Level Office Drone (Faking It, and Badly).
This month it was blue eyes. Mousy brown hair. Maybe a little too much time between waxings, if the state of her eyebrows and upper lip were anything to go by.
Bang, bang, bang went the knuckles on the door, right on time.
"Are you ready to go? You need to leave in precisely two minutes in order to get to work by the start of your workday."
"Are you visible yet?" Penny called back. She already knew the answer. It had been almost six weeks since she last heard that hum. Since she felt it raise the hairs on the back of her neck and smelled autumn in the middle of a Florida spring.
They'd found ways around it, mostly, but Penny missed being able to look him in the eye. To watch the way his face changed when she riled him up, or the slight flush that rose up through his neck and face when she forgot for a few hours what a terrible idea it was to get involved with the crazy man who'd ruined her life. She wondered if it was time to make some sort of ultimatum, if reminding him of all the ways visible Sheldon was useful to her would be enough to kick his brain in gear to fix whatever had fritzed out inside the device.
"One minute, forty-five seconds," he said instead of answering. The door creaked open an inch or two, his yellow-gloved fingers coming around the edge like some kind of horror movie villain.
Or Brad Pitt-in-Fight Club, her mind unhelpfully supplied. Wrenching the door open, a panting, half-dressed Penny in the room behind him, Sheldon barking out monosyllabic answers to annoying questions....
Penny swept her hair up in a ponytail, trying to cool down the sudden rush of heat that flooded through her.
Six weeks was an awfully goddamn long time.
iv. a year after the shift change
"Macaroni and cheese."
Penny wrinkled her nose and tossed another cord of wood on the fire. "Seriously? Homemade or Kraft?"
"Shit, girl, are you kidding? I would eat that damn cheese powder dry at this point." Sherry finished cranking the can opener and poured the beans into the cast-iron pot. "What about you? You gotta be prepared in case we wander into civilization tomorrow, you know."
"Yeah, yeah, I know. Um," Penny scratched her chin while she pretended to think.
They'd played the same game every night for as long as she could remember, since she and Sherry had said goodbye to Jorge at the crossroads. But while Sherry's answer changed every day, depending on her mood or the brightness of the moon through the clouds or whatever, Penny cycled through the same list over and over again. In the months they'd been moving through the traveling lands, Penny had honed it down until it was worn smooth in her mind, razor-thin and translucent; the list, like shells too impossibly delicate to survive the journey to a sandy beach, breaking up under the waves and waiting to slice through the tender skin of some tourist's foot.
"I'll start with an appletini," she said. Just the syllables were enough to taste it on her lips and tongue. Tart and sweet and wet. The alcohol that always seemed just a little oily. That burst of sourness on the roof of her mouth.
Tomorrow night, she would remember fajitas. The tortilla, soft and supple; vegetables still sizzling on the plate, bitter char marks criss-crossing the crisp julienned peppers and onions. The vinegary scent of salsa under her nose as she polished off the chip basket, laughing at her appetite, chile seeds burning holes in her tongue.
"And there'd better be a big ol' hunk of Granny Smith floating in that sucker, too," she added, just to hear Sherry's silvery laugh floating up alongside the smoke into the sky.
v. a year after the party
"Saguaro," he said again, with extra emphasis on the wɑroʊ since she hadn't yet said it right.
"Sog-arrow," Jill repeated, as stubborn in her mispronunciation as she was when forced to apologize to her brother. She pointed at the next page. "What's that?"
"That's a burrowing owl," Sheldon read from the caption under the picture.
She slapped a hand to her face and laughed, open-mouthed and loud. "He looks funny! Like Miz Barnett."
While they'd been turning pages in the book, Jill had slowly risen to her knees in her chair. She plopped back down again when Sheldon pressed on the top of her head before she cracked it against his chin.
"What's funny about the way Mrs Barnett looks?" He'd only met the woman once, when the babysitter cancelled with no notice. Penny, trapped at work, had called and all but begged him to pick the kids up from school.
"Her legs are skinnier than all the rest of her. Like a chicken," Jill said. She sounded bored with the very digression she'd introduced to the conversation. Nothing new there; her brain whizzed from one idea to the next at a rate that would have exhausted Sheldon if he weren't intimately familiar with the behavior himself.
At the rate they were going tonight, though, it didn't seem likely the girl would ever focus enough to learn how to read for herself. Smart as the dickens, but without a lick of sense in her whole body, as his mom would, and did, say.
Sheldon turned to the next page, and Jill stopped him with a tiny hand on his wrist. He dutifully turned back to the owl picture and sat back to wait for her next question.
"How does it burrow in the rocks?"
He leaned forward and skimmed the page. The photo showed an owl standing on a grassy rise, soft brown dirt under its talons. But in the paragraph just above it was a sentence about how the birds took advantage of existing structures when the ground was too hard to dig their own.
"I don't know," he hedged, tapping her on the head again when she started to pop out of her seat like a jack-in-the-box. "What do you think?"
Her progress was so frustratingly slow that he wondered if she weren't playing dumb, to still be unable to read so she could stretch out the lessons. He couldn't pretend that he hadn't noticed the way both children kept pushing him in their mother's path. But when he'd said as much, Penny had flushed a soft red and shot the idea down.
Sheldon ignored the twinge of regret the memory of her denial still dredged up.
Jill hummed, drummed a finger against her lips the way her mother did right before she changed the subject. "I bet they steal other people's houses!"
"Jilly!" he gasped in mock disapproval. He let his usual accent lapse into the one he still carried from childhood, the one she and Danny had begged to hear over and over and over again after spending an afternoon glued to a marathon of cheesy old westerns. "You can't just accuse innocent owls of house thievin'."
"But it's right th—" Her eyes went wide, wispy blonde eyebrows disappearing under her bangs as she caught herself about to give away the whole game. She snatched her hand back from where she'd been about to point out the relevant passage in the book.
Before Sheldon could respond, Jill hopped down out of her chair and grabbed his hand. She tugged with all her might, trying to drag him along behind her. "I bet Mommy knows. C'mon!"
Mommy probably didn't have any idea there even was such a thing as a burrowing owl, but Sheldon let himself be tugged in her direction anyway.
vi. a year after more than one ending
She finished paying out on the hands at the table and pulled the cards across the felt. The big-bellied woman in the wolf shirt stood, juggling her chips and drink, and thanked her in a voice that probably carried a good two or three tables away.
"Enjoy the rest of your stay, ma'am!" Penny reached out to collect the two chip tip she'd left, and looked up with a smile.
When the woman moved away from the table, parting the crowd around her as she made her way to the bar, Penny froze. Ten seconds later, and she would never have known he was there.
It was Sheldon, standing near the roulette tables, his elbows tucked close against his side as he looked around.
Penny smiled again, and raised her hand to wave and shout his name. Floor rules be damned, personal rules be damned, she hadn't seen him in months, not since the day she told him it was kinder to let themselves go. A sweet curl of joy rose in her chest. Had he come looking for her?
But before she could get his attention, a woman stepped up next to him and wrapped her hand around his skinny bicep. He ducked his head toward her, her frizzy brown hair a perfect complement for his short, smooth hair.
She lost track of them after that, deliberately. Kept her attention trained on her table until someone came to relieve her. She clapped out and signed over her drawer, nodded along with the floorman's end of shift instructions, nodded up at the security camera over the employee exit; she was hyperaware of everything around her but weirdly detached from it, like she was on autopilot the whole time, or watching herself in a dream.
As she ripped off her bowtie and vest and flung them in her locker, she thought maybe it was time she finished running, all the way back to the big empty house still waiting for her outside Omaha.
vii. a year after the accidental date
"Tell you what, I never thought I'd see the day Sheldon actually brought a girl home, let alone one who fits in as good as you."
Penny shifted the giant frozen turkey on her lap. Even wrapped in plastic and paper bags, it was dripping condensation (she hoped) all over her. She smiled at Uncle Badger, as he insisted she call him, or tried to, anyway. He was a little too much like her own uncles for it to be totally unweird. She kept waiting for her aunt Kelly to start screeching from the jumpseat.
"Sorry," she said, feeling her face start to pull into a frown. "He's never brought a girl home before?"
Badger pulled the unlit cigar out of his mouth and guffawed. If he hadn't been trying to steer and shift at the same time, Penny would have bet good money he would have slapped his knee and punched her shoulder, too.
No, wait, red light. She braced herself against the door as his hand came up to her shoulder.
"That's a good one," he said between chuckles. "Shelly bringing a girl home. No, Pen, you're the first. And damn glad I am, too, lots of girls out there who wouldn't want to spend an afternoon at a turkey shoot with an old goat like me."
It wasn't exactly her idea of a great afternoon either, but Badger was really hard to say no to once he got an idea in his head. And for some reason he'd kept the idea in his head ever since he met her in Pasadena, the night his family had kidnapped her and tried to force-feed her barbecue.
Plus, hello, turkey shoot with prizes? She had plans for this week that didn't involve going with anyone or their mom to pick out their own poultry from a pen.
The stoplight changed and Badger peeled out. Penny braced the turkey against the dash.
"You guys stick around next weekend, you and me'll go down to the bay and do some fishin'. Hell, we'll even take Sheldon!"
viii. a year after the blockbuster
When the job offer finally came, there was nothing for Gilda to say but yes. It made sense, a total feather in her cap and bragging rights besides.
"So, that's it?" Penny said, swallowing down her disappointment. "You're going?"
"Of course I am. What's left for me here?"
Me, Penny wanted to say. Wanted to scream. Stay here with me. For me.
But it wouldn't get her any farther with Gilda than it ever had with Sheldon.
Someday, Penny promised herself, she was going to fall in love with someone who would look up from their work long enough to notice.
ix. a year after the game
The chair felt way more comfortable than Penny thought it had any right to be. A lawyer's office wasn't a place where people were supposed to be comfortable, was it? Well, maybe it was when the office was as fancy as this one. She doubted anyone here had ever had to clean puke out of a carpet or stand next to a client dying slowly from infected track marks, which was all she'd ever known when it came to lawyers.
"Do you understand, ma'am?"
"Oh, sure," she said, even though she didn't. He'd used a lot of words she didn't know. Lots and lots, in fact. Probate sounded dirty but wasn't, apparently. Or else somebody was in for a rude surprise, and for once it wasn't her.
The lawyer smiled and handed her a pen. "Just sign at the blue flags and initial the yellow."
As she flipped each page, he slid them across the desk and made two stacks.
"So, any plans? I know you weren't expecting this, but I bet you've got some ideas."
He sounded as excited for her windfall as she knew she should feel, but when she tried to play along, all she could think of was the doctor in his metal chair. If it weren't for the documents she'd just pretended to understand, she wouldn't even remember his name, let alone his face beyond a blur of sallow skin and thinning hair. Her only clear memory was of the barbecue bacon burger, well-done, and a Coke with two cherries.
That was all she had left, the rest crowded out by the grind of life and death between his last visit to Mac's and now.
x. a year after the sunscreen
The vacation she picked, Penny was proud to say, was everything their trip the year before wasn't. A week at cozy resort in Arizona, surrounded by mountains that turned purple when the sun set. Purification cleanses and mud baths, and the hot waiter in the black polo shirt hanging on their every word at the nightly cocktail hour. It was tranquil and peaceful and relaxing.
And boring as fuck.
"It's Spring Break," Katie whined, flopping face-first onto her pool chaise. "Why aren't we drunk in Acapulco or something? Anything. Jesus."
Lee snorted. "Thanks, but I've had enough holding your hair while you puke on the side of a dirt road for one lifetime."
Penny listened with half an ear, much too busy trying to let go of her surroundings and give herself over to nature to try to mediate another round of the grudge match heading into its third decade
"Oh, for God's sake, you need to get laid."
"Says you."
"Shut up. Who? Waiter Walter?"
Penny cracked an eye open to see Lee cross his arms and smirk.
Katie turned on her back and threw an arm over her eyes. "I hate you."
xi. a year after the last straw
Penny loves Facebook.
In real life, she has two friends. Sure, there are people she's on good terms with at work. There are the dates she goes on to look normal, like she doesn't come home afterward and cry in the shower until she feels hollowed out. She's doing the best job she possibly can to be who everyone expects to see when they look at her.
But when it comes right down to it: she has Leonard, and she has Sheldon.
Online, though. Online she's as popular as Katie— As she always wanted to be. Katie has no place here. Katie, as far as she's concerned, is lying somewhere in a pile of ash. Penny has a lot of friends, tons of Farmville gifts and pokes and birthday wishes. She's a Sagittarius now, and she almost never flinches when she announces it.
Penny also has a short list of news feeds she checks, thanks to the tricks she picked up from some random message board Howard liked. She creeps on the people from home, keeps an eye on her family. Never uses anything that can be traced anywhere between Pasadena and Omaha; she's lonely and homesick, but she's not stupid.
If she feels the phantom weight of a gun in her hand when Sheldon asks why she cares so much about people she's never met, well. That's not something Penny knows anything about, is it?
xii. a year after the trial run
The rooftop was crowded with people, with barely enough room to walk between them, let alone make one's way to the chairs on the far side of the pool where one could sit in peace. Sheldon crossed his arms and glared at the nearest cluster of revelers. Maybe if he concentrated hard enough one or more might move out of his way.
Leonard took another sip of his drink and clenched his teeth. "Could you at least pretend you're not plotting everyone's doom?"
"No."
"Oh, come on!"
"There is absolutely no reason for me to be here, and although it's only barely semantically possible, there is even less reason for me to act friendly while you force me to spend an evening with drunken strangers. How did you even get invited?"
"I didn't, not exactly. And you're going to scare off all the girls!"
Sheldon turned in a circle, hands spread. "Yes, I wouldn't want to frighten off all the viable sexual candidates who are simply flocking to our sides."
But Leonard had stopped paying attention and was smoothing back his hair. Sheldon followed his gaze to see the tall, shapely brunette who'd just stepped out of the stairwell.
"Oh, God," Leonard moaned. "She's here. Oh, God, she's coming over here! Quick, act like I said something funny!"
When Sheldon didn't, he started laughing, high and nervous like a hyena who'd just spotted the lioness on his tail. As the object of his latest infatuation squeezed past them with barely a glance, Sheldon snorted.
"Is it too late to downgrade your 'imaginary future children together' to 'unattainable fantasy children even were she to suffer memory loss and an inexplicable fondness for homunculi'?"
Leonard scowled.
xiii. a year after only one ending
Somewhere, in some other universe, where candy showers are common or the moon sets in the east, there is wind and sun and water and earth. These are here, too, just as always.
In one of those other universes, there are friends sharing a lazy meal and sweet kisses traded under a full moon. There's a hand sliding up the inside of a thigh. Soft whispers loosened in the dark. A rush of breath, shaken and shallow.
But not here. Here, there's no one left to see what remains. There are memories that float through the air, free to travel where they will, with no one left to catch them.
xiv. a year after the team
The ditch where they were waiting for the sign from Raj was rapidly filling with water. Cold water. Cold, muddy rainwater surging toward them from the blacktopped road, with eddies of rainbow oil slick on the surface, and grit that would stick to their skin long after the water dried.
"You know I have a delicate constitution," Sheldon said for at least the fifth time.
Penny ignored him. At least he was holding position, for all his complaining. She lowered her binoculars and gave him a once-over. On his belly in the grass as he was, it was a pretty nice once-over, too. His pants were plastered to his legs from the rain, and his ridiculous rain slicker wasn't enough to make up for the way his pale hands looked against the dark mud.
"You've got the same damn constitution I've got," Penny shot back.
She was every bit as miserable but leaving wasn't an option for either of them. They'd come here to do the job, to help the nice old lady who'd hired them to clear her son's name, and by God, they were going to do the damn job.
She leaned in close and jabbed a finger into Sheldon's shoulder. "Suck. It. Up."
"I still say we could have waited in the truck," he grumbled as he swiped her binoculars and peered across the road.
Penny flopped back down beside him and pulled her hat lower. "If you don't say one more word for the next half hour, I'll buy you the super-sized tub of VapoRub, I swear to God."
xv. a year after the audition
Sheldon keeps promising her that they'll be able to leave soon. Not in so many words, of course. He can't afford to be that sloppy. Neither of them can. But Penny can hear it, in the pauses between words he can't say. She feels it in the press of his lips against hers, so sure and strong.
She doesn't know what he does every day. Doesn't know where he goes. Penny stays in their room until someone comes to get her, and then she sits at her desk until someone takes her back. She learns to type by touch instead of sight. She learns to stop asking question, to stop expecting answers. She remembers to keep her brow smooth and her mouth turned up, and she never, ever forgets.
The food is nothing to write home about — as if she could, even if she wanted to. But she can't feel the hollows between Sheldon's wrist bones anymore, and the weight of him over her is as solid as she's ever felt it. Where once he was slipping away, fading away right in front of her, now he is real and sturdy and present.
Penny wonders how long it will be before Sheldon finally realizes his promises are as empty as the silence that engulfs them.