One shot. Another take on the events of The Status Quo Combustion (season 7, ep. 24)

Sheldon leaned his forearms against the stone balustrade and gazed out over the night skyline of Hollywood. He had come here to one of his favorite places to gain some perspective, but his thoughts kept chasing round and round meaninglessly inside his head. Penny had finally broken down and proposed to Leonard. Neither of them had listened to his repeated warnings that this was a bad idea. Now, he would have to deal with the changes that their ill-considered decision would visit upon him. He shuddered. Leonard would probably want to move in with Penny. That meant he would either be moving out, or ask Sheldon to leave and sublet the apartment to them. In either scenario, he could all too easily picture Amy wanting to move in with him, a step that he was nowhere near ready to take.

He recognized the soft rhythm of the footsteps as they approached. A slight stirring of the air wafted the scent of green apples toward him.

"Hello, Penny. How did you know I would be here?" he asked without turning around.

His roommate's new fiancee came to stand next to him, leaning her arms on the rail in imitation of his posture. "I didn't. The observatory was number..." She counted on her fingers for a moment. "...number six of the places I checked. Next on my list was going to be breaking into the zoo after hours to see if you went to watch the koalas sleep."

"I do love koalas," he said wistfully. After a pause, he asked, "Why are you here?"

"I was worried about you," she said reproachfully. "I know how much you hate change. I thought you should know, Leonard and I talked it over, and we're not going to move in together yet. I think it's best for everyone involved."

"Are you saying that Leonard doesn't want to cohabit with you?"

"Well, no, but you know, there's not enough room for my furniture at your place, and my one-bedroom's too tiny, so..." Her voice trailed off.

"If you are not ready for the commitment of cohabitating with Leonard, then why on earth did you propose to him, woman?" Sheldon asked irritably.

Penny was taken aback. "I... You know, our relationship's just reached this point, and... oh hell, Sheldon, it's not like I'm getting any younger."

"I fail to see the correlation," he griped.

"It's all very well and good for you and Amy to have this relationship of the minds. All I've ever had is my face and my figure. Leonard took one look at me on that first day I moved into my apartment and started thinking about what our children would look like. That was seven years ago. I was a lot more hopeful and confident then. Honestly, Leonard was never my type. It took me almost three years to give him a chance, and even then, I broke up with him because he wasn't..."

"Right for you?" Sheldon supplied.

Penny shot him a sour look. "The kind of guy I could imagine spending the rest of my life with. I mean, I guess I love him, but it's not the crazy, head-over-heels kind of love I always wanted. But my dreams are just that: dreams. I need to settle down and start making some mature decisions, not go chasing after stuff that's never going to happen." She looked up into his face for a moment and then quickly looked away. "I mean, I know that's why you're with Amy. She's smart, annoying, weird, and a terrible dresser. She's like the female version of you. You didn't fall in love with her; you're just with her because the two of you together make sense, right?"

"That's right," Sheldon said. "My choice of Amy was completely based on logic, not some base carnal urges."

"Yeah, I figured as much. Figures you'd choose her," Penny muttered. "But I'm pretty sure that if you continue down this path with Amy, she's going to insist on those carnal urges. I just hope that someday you'll understand that they aren't nearly as awful as you think."

Sheldon was now staring down at Penny with a puzzled frown on his face. "What did you mean when you said that it 'figures I would choose her'?" he asked.

"Because she's smart. You like her for her brains, not her body."

"No, that's not it," he said slowly. "You spoke in the present tense, not the past tense, implying that the choice is presently being made, which further posits an alternative. Penny, who is that alternative?"

She looked down and fidgeted with the zipper on her jacket. "Just forget it, Sheldon, okay? I don't want to talk about it."

He tilted his head to examine her closed expression for a long moment, then exclaimed, "You're the alternative! You're implying that I chose Amy over you. I'm the guy," he ended, sounding more confused than elated over figuring out her meaning.

She huffed and turned around, leaning her back against the stone balcony. "It's not like that," she scowled. "At least, not really. Come on, Sheldon, don't make me spell it out."

"I'm afraid I must ask you to elucidate your meaning, as I am incapable of following your twisted thinking that I would hesitate to classify as logic."

"You see, that's exactly what I'm talking about!" Penny cried, pointing a finger at him. "It doesn't matter if you are—or were—the guy, because I was clearly never 'the girl' for you."

He stepped closer until he was almost looming over Penny in the darkness. "So I was the guy," he persisted. "Am I still? And why didn't you tell me?"

Penny sighed and ran a hand through her hair. "That first day we met, it was obvious that Leonard had a crush on me. But if you had shown any kind of interest, if you had been less… less Sheldon-y, things might have turned out a lot differently. I thought you were cute, at least until you got all crazy on me. So there's your answer. You'll always be the guy... and you never were. You didn't date, you didn't do romance, and you thought sex was like a big waste of time. That is, until you met your double in female form. And now you have Amy, and I have Leonard, and we're all going to be very happy. Satisfied?"

After a long silence, he said quietly, "No, I'm not at all satisfied with this outcome."

"Neither am I," Penny said sadly. "But you can't always get what you want. And what I wanted never really existed in the first place."

They stood side by side in the dark, each alone with their thoughts. Sheldon pretended not to notice the glistening moisture that trickled down Penny's cheeks. She was quiet for longer than he had ever imagined possible. At last, she wiped her face with her sleeve and said, "We should go home. Amy's worried about you."

In the weeks that followed, Sheldon found Penny's words coming back to mind at the oddest times. The worst was when it popped into his head as he dutifully kissed Amy good night at the end of one of their dates. He remembered it at work as he was failing to make progress on his latest ideas about string theory. It didn't make sense. He wished desperately that he could just put it out of his mind, but of course, his eidetic memory rendered that impossible.

So one night after work, he went over and knocked on Penny's door. She wasn't working that night, but neither did she join him and Leonard for dinner. It was yet another puzzling aspect of her relationship with Leonard. Now that they were engaged, he would have expected them to spend more time together, not less. When Penny answered her door, he solemnly asked permission to enter. That permission granted, he stepped into her living room. Clasping his hands behind his back, he began walking back and forth, uncertain how to start.

"Sheldon, you're pacing." Penny came up to him and laid a hand on his arm. "What's wrong, sweetie?"

"You are," he blurted out.

She backed off and raised an eyebrow at him. "Excuse me?" she asked in a tone that made his knees want to knock together.

He shook his head and tried again. "You've given up on your dreams. You proposed to Leonard, knowing that you are more fond of him than you are in love with him. You struggle through college classes which are beyond your abilities in a mistaken attempt to prove yourself to Leonard, and now you let him talk you into a sales career that I have heard you call a soul-sucking corporate nightmare," he said, curving his fingers into air quotes at that last phrase.

Penny bit her lip, wrapped her arms around her middle and looked down at the floor. "I know how much you hate change, but that's just the way things are now."

Sheldon took a step closer to her. "This isn't…" He hesitated, shocked at what he was about to say. "This isn't about me. You're not the person that I became friends with seven years ago. The person you were then would go junior rodeo on you for allowing yourself to become so beaten down and disillusioned."

Penny's head dropped, and she began rubbing hastily at her eyes. "I don't know what else I can do," she whispered. "I can't make it as an actress, and there really aren't that many decent guys out there."

"Is decency a strong enough motivation for you to pledge the rest of your life to him?" Sheldon asked.

Penny shook her head. Sheldon had had enough. He grabbed her arms and shook her.

"Stop feeling sorry for yourself! You sound just like Leonard!" he shouted.

She shoved him away and spat out an obscenity at him. He didn't care. He pushed her by the shoulders. She kicked him in the shin, and then he grabbed a handful of her hair and yanked hard. She shrieked and twisted away, wrenching his arm and overbalancing him. He caught at her waist, dragging her down with him. They wrestled for a few more minutes on Penny's floor, until her old Junior Rodeo instincts kicked in. She pinned him and sat on his chest. He froze, suddenly aware that they had been rolling around on the dirty floor like grade schoolers. What on earth had gotten into them? He waited passively for Penny to release him, but she was having none of it.

"Fight back, damn you! Fight back!" she cried. She gripped his wrists in an iron grasp and pulled them over his head.

"How?" he gasped.

She grinned and leaned over him, lips pursed. They had wrestled once before, on a group game night, and once she pinned him, she had kissed his nose. Realizing she was going to do the same thing, he squirmed but succeeded only in making her kiss land on his cheek instead of his nose. Seeing that she was repeating her actions from that night, he twisted as she bent over him to pepper his face with kisses. This time, he managed to dislodge her and elbowed her in the side. She went after him again, but he was learning and evaded her grip a few more times.

Then he actually managed to use his longer limbs to an advantage. He caught her off balance as she had been getting to her feet. She stumbled awkwardly and went down, hitting her head on the edge of the coffee table. The loud thunk of her head colliding with the hard wood instantly seared into his emotional memory, not his eidetic one, as a wave of horror swept over him. What had he done? What if she were hurt, or worse?

He didn't even bother getting up off the floor, just crawled over to her. He lifted her head gently and began combing his fingers through her hair. The injury was easy to find. There was no blood, fortunately, but a large lump was already pushing up under her skin. She moaned as his fingers brushed over it, and he felt a wave of relief so powerful that his eyes started stinging. He blinked rapidly to clear the unfamiliar sensation.

"Penny," he called softly, then said her name twice more because it just felt right.

She opened her eyes and winced. Placing a hand on his arm, she murmured, "I'm all right."

"No, you are most certainly not," he argued. "You suffered cranial trauma and may have a concussion. I need to see if your pupils are unevenly dilated." He leaned closer.

She pushed his hand away as he attempted to pull open her eyes. He had to settle for a visual examination. She struggled into a sitting position, and he put a hand on her back to aid her. He leaned in closer and peered carefully at her face, satisfying himself that her pupils were the same size. He studied her eyes carefully. He had never been this close to her before. He was fascinated by the shimmering flecks of gold and green that shimmered in her irises.

"I never meant to hurt you," he said quietly. "I don't understand why we seem to be at odds."

"Really? You have no idea?" she asked. She drew nearer by degrees until their faces were almost touching. Her breath feathered against his cheek. "No idea why we ended up rolling around on the floor like two-year-olds? It's because we can't approach our situation like adults, because that would involve… something neither of us want to do."

She pulled back, and Sheldon stared at her aghast. He had felt slightly nervous but not panicked by her proximity. In fact, from the way he had been holding his breath, he believed he had been anticipating whatever she was going to do next. "Tell me. What is the thing that neither of us wants to do?" he demanded.

"You really don't know," she murmured, and he couldn't tell if that was a statement or a question. She held his gaze with her hypnotic appraisal, and her lips curved up in a Mona Lisa smile. "If we were both free, when you took hold of me, I would have kissed you. Not just some dry, little peck on the mouth, but a promise to each other that at last we would finish what we started with our first fight. I'd feel the way your lips softened under mine and taste all that bottled-up passion as you finally discover that something besides science turns you on. Your hands would start at my waist and slid up my body until you had pulled me tight against you. The feel of your arms around me makes me want to melt into you. You're drunk on the way I feel, and you have to see and touch and taste every inch of me. Wherever I touch you, it burns like an inferno. Every moment is sweeter and sharper than the last until we aren't two people but one. And the pleasure that you thought would drown you ends up washing over you and healing places inside of you that you didn't even know were broken. And you would realize the truth that you've been fighting all along: that we belong together and you can never let me go."

When Penny fell quiet, the silence was punctuated only by the ragged sounds of Sheldon's uneven breaths as he struggled to understand what had just happened to him. He closed his eyes as the logical part of his mind fought against it, but there was no discounting the empirical evidence of his own body's reaction to her words. Just her words: she hadn't even touched him. He opened his eyes and looked into hers. "You are the girl," he said softly.

She smiled, and a whole new world of possibilities opened up before him. "You've always been my guy."

He reached for her, wonderingly caressing her golden locks and brushing a tear from her cheek. But when he leaned towards her, she pulled away, although her eyes darkened with pain as she did so. "I don't cheat," she whispered regretfully.

A small crease appeared between his brows. "I have no such qualms," he replied, as he lowered his mouth to hers. Her kiss was everything she had described to him and more, but still she pulled away.

"Sheldon…" she said longingly, pleadingly.

"Penny," he whispered, and the timbre of his voice sent shivers down her spine. Their eyes met in wordless communication, and no further words were needed. Sheldon reached out a hand to help her to her feet, and his fingers lingered in her grasp. He glanced again at Penny, noting that she now seemed to glow with an inner joy.

"Tomorrow," she whispered. "Meet me here tomorrow and…"

"And we'll both be free," he said, finishing her sentence.

Tears glimmered in her eyes as she nodded, and he gently brushed the moisture from her lashes. "My girl," he said proudly.

And they went out together to reclaim their futures.