Rules:

1. Sheldon/Penny – They can be platonic, romantic, smutty, Super Heroes/Villains, etc.

2. Leonard/Amy's death MAY occur anytime from the Pilot thru Season 9

3. The death must be completed in a single chapter, although you are welcome to contribute as many different forms of death as you like as long as they are a chapter each.

4. The story must be no more than 1,500 words long.

5. Deadline is October 31, 2015.

100 Ways To Kill a Doctor: Closure

Somewhere between telling Amy that he wished she were dead and telling Penny that he loved her, Sheldon realized that he needed his life to change. The idea of it was frightening, but even more appalling was the idea that he would be forced to change in order to meet someone else's ideals.

Penny had said she loved that he was in her life. She hadn't qualified the statement in any way. Whereas Amy had attempted to modify his behavior to her notion of acceptable.

Sheldon prepared for bed, considering the direction of his life. His work was no longer satisfying, constantly plagued by the failed monopole expedition. He frowned. His quality of life had begun to degrade immediately upon his return to Pasadena, claiming to have proven string theory, only to be forced to retract his statement due to Leonard, Howard and Raj's actions.

The physicist frowned and went to his whiteboard rather than his bed and began to write out the ramifications of Leonard's actions as a formula.

Around eleven in the evening drunken laughter disturbed his concentration and he frowned again. His life wasn't the only one that had deteriorated since the Arctic. Penny had been in a downward spiral ever since her first coital encounter with Leonard.

He designated a separate whiteboard for Penny.

Terminating his relationship agreement with Amy wasn't hard. He'd included a clause that allowed him to dissolve the agreement at will. He'd grown up in Texas after all.

Dissolving his relationship with Leonard and resetting his life was proving to be more difficult. Perhaps it was time to consider other alternatives.

Penny entered Sheldon's apartment with a worried frown. "Hey Sheldon, have you seen Leonard? He was supposed to meet me for coffee this afternoon and he never showed."

Sheldon looked at her and shook his head telling himself that it was for the best and suppressing his twitch with an effort. If he could lie about something like a fictional cousin sans twitch he could lie about this. "I'm afraid I haven't seen him since this morning when he drove me to work." He stirred the lemon into his tea. "Did you want to wait for him? I was about to order pizza and watch some Star Trek."

Penny sighed and nodded, "Thanks sweetie, that'd be nice. We were supposed to go out to eat afterwards. I'm starving."

"Have some tea, I'll order and then we can relax." Sheldon suggested.

Penny and Sheldon filed a police report after forty eight hours, the minimum length of time after which they could report Leonard missing. Since Leonard was (ostensibly) an adult, the police weren't too worried. Sheldon got the impression the police believed Penny was overreacting.

The forty eight hours was a more than adequate length of time for him to lay a trail of emails linking Leonard and Amy in an illicit sexual relationship. Thanks to some manipulation on Sheldon's part (laughably easy), Leonard had made a will leaving all of his worldly belongings to Penny so that she would be taken care of. Amy had done the same with him. She'd informed him thusly prior to their breakup and he doubted she'd had the time to change it since then. It hadn't been an intimacy he'd desired but at the time he'd appreciated the sentiment.

When Amy didn't show up for 'Girls Night', Penny and Bernadette called, no answer, then went to her apartment, again no answer. Then Penny violated Amy's privacy and called Mrs. Fowler asking if she'd heard from Amy lately.

The resounding no was enough to send Penny back to the police station. Again, the police didn't seem terribly worried but they agreed to look into it. Bernadette apparently had to bring out her scary voice but it got results.

Credit cards and cell phones were wonderful ways to find people who didn't want to be found and didn't have the street smarts to live off the grid.

Sheldon found it ludicrously easy to lead the police to a small rental home on the outskirts of Pasadena. Sadly, the weather had been chilly lately and the home's furnace leaked carbon monoxide like a sieve. The batteries in the detector were long dead; Amy and Leonard had no way of knowing they were being slowly poisoned.

Penny was upset, but also pragmatic enough to admit that she and Leonard had been having trouble for a while. With the money she could get by selling his collectibles and belonging she could pay off a lot of her debts.

Sheldon admitted to himself that killing Amy hadn't been strictly necessary but it had been satisfying. Her unsubtle attempts to change and manipulate him had aggravated him to the point of no return.

He looked over at Penny, on the couch reading her history text. He had agreed to buy Leonard's collectibles and comics from her. They'd managed to sell the rest of Amy and Leonard's possessions and he was considering alternatives to his position at Cal-Tech.

"Penny, have you ever considered starting over?" He asked thoughtfully, contemplating his white boards where the equations representing him and Penny were written.

"You mean no crummy apartment, no pile of debt, no history of failed auditions and lousy tips," Penny sighed, obviously considering it. "Yeah. Lotsa times. But it takes money to start over. Most of my bills are paid now, or will be soon, but that just means I'm out of debt. Starting over tends to put you in debt."

Sheldon nodded. "An excellent point." He considered all he had done, renting a house in Leonard's name, luring him there via a fake Facebook account, doing the same to Amy and turning on the furnace full blast after rendering them both unconscious with sleep aids in wine. Leaving them there for a full week after Leonard had been reported missing just helped to set the scene.

If he could do all that in aid of resetting his life and for the satisfaction of revenge what could he do in order to get the fresh start he and Penny both needed?

Perhaps something that suited her, in a place that suited them both. "Perhaps you can restart your Penny Blossom business. We could share the rent here and you could use Leonard's desk space as your work area. You seem to enjoy your college classes, some courses in jewelry making or design might suit you. And you could continue auditioning for acting work."

"How would that give you a fresh start though Sheldon?" Penny was watching him shrewdly and he smiled.

"I am thinking I might resign from Cal-Tech and take a position at another University. One where I am not constantly mocked. I've published enough that Stanford would offer me a position. And I could telecommute."

Penny nodded her understanding. "And you'd get away from Winkle and Kripke."

Sheldon nodded. "I'd made some overtures recently, sharing information regarding the Monopole Expedition and its...erroneous conclusion."

"You mean the fact that Leonard sabotaged you and made you look like a fool." Penny summarized. Sheldon nodded and Penny echoed his movement, "Makes sense. Leonard isn't here to argue or be hurt by it. I didn't understand at first. Not until I started reading about what you guys do. It was part of why... why I don't know if Leonard and I would have ever made it. If he could do that, to you, his best friend, how could I trust him to treat me right? Trust him with me?"

Sheldon knew exactly how she felt. "I hope you can trust me Penny."

"Moon Pie, you're the only guy I know I can trust one hundred percent." Penny grinned at him. "Even if you're one lab accident away from being a super villain." Her eyes gleamed at him and he blinked. Penny had a look about her that suggested she knew something. That was not good.

"Penny," He began and she interrupted him gently.

"Sheldon, I trust you. You can trust me. Even with the things you can't talk about. I know you'd never hurt me on purpose. I hope you know I'd never hurt you." Penny opened her history text again and made some notes on her laptop. "Besides, now that you've learnt to lie without twitching, we should really take you to Vegas and see how much we can clean up counting cards."

Sheldon gaped at her and simply shook his head. For someone with an eidetic memory he constantly forgot that underestimating Penny led to some large shocks.

"I hope...you approve of the change?" He asked hesitantly, cursing the vagueness of the question. But he couldn't exactly ask 'Do you approve of me murdering two people who hurt us over and over?' Could he?

Penny smiled at him. "Honey if you'd done something I didn't approve of, you'd know it."

Sheldon considered that and decided to let sleeping cats lie.

Author's Note: So I decided that Amy's attempt at forcing Sheldon to change would have some not so pleasant results for her and Leonard. Everybody else has gotten to kill Leonard and Amy, so he needed a turn. Not quite a super villain but not lily white either. As usual, all trollish flame reviewers are thanked for driving up my page views. Abusive guest reviews will be deleted, regardless of the language they're written in.