Four stand-alone one-shots originally written and posted for the Penny and Sheldon Paradox Drabble-a-thon, Chaos Theory.

Stories:

1. Ribbons of Green
Penny prepares for the 'Big Day'

2. Like a Bad Dream
With her unusual neighbours working at the very tip of the Earth at the Arctic Circle, Penny struggles with being alone on her birthday without 'him'.

3. Sweet Discord (Drumming Song)
Penny attempts to learn a new, and noisy, instrument.

4. Movin'
Sheldon finally moves in with Penny, but after a several glitches in the plan, does this mean Sheldon doesn't like living with her?

1. Ribbons of Green
Prompt: Bride and groom's first dance.

The wedding was going to be beautiful. As the plans were laid out over a period of months, every time Penny saw Sheldon bent over a floor plan trying to finalize the seating arrangement or busily scrawling names on wedding invitations, a little smile came to her face at the sight of him, his eyes bright with an enthusiasm that was hard to detect on the surface. But she knew him well enough to know he expressed enthusiasm in the form of work. If he was busy planning, and at the level of detail that found him personally applying the little gold 'adhesive decorative images' on each personalized invite, then he was happy.

He really did want to get married then.

Penny woke up earlier than she had planned to on the Big Day (without a hangover too, no thanks to the Maid of Honour's attempt at replacing Penny's, and everyone else's, blood with alcohol at the Bachelorette Party). In fact it may still have been dark outside her hotel window when she slipped out of bed, but Penny deliberately neglected her closed curtains, chosing to keep them drawn when she pulled herself onto her feet and padded into the ensuite bathroom. She cleansed her face, pulled back her hair, and began the process of putting on her make-up.

Despite the attempt to distract herself with the business of carefully applying the various levels of make-up needed for a wedding, Penny's resistless mind still raced with images.

She remembered the night Sheldon proposed, and how he was when the answer was 'yes'. He confessed to her later how nervous he'd been as he dropped to one knee so agilely Penny wondered if he'd been practicing in his room all the day before.

Presently Penny finished fixing her hair. If she had slept easily last night she would have been waking up about now, and she could have done her hair and make-up with the bridesmaids like she'd planned to. But throughout the night her stomach turned with butterflies which kept her from the relief of sleep, where thoughts about weddings and vows wouldn't have eaten at her. She wandered out the bathroom and over to the dressing table where she had laid out her shoes the night before, and her necklace. And the dress.

It wasn't going to be the chatter of the excited bridesmaids that would do it. It wouldn't even be the vows in the main hall downstairs, decorated with hand-picked floral arrangements and fragile pink candles, that would get to her either. It was going to be the first dance.

The thought of Sheldon standing at the top of the aisle, handsome in his freshly pressed morning suit, was nothing compared with the symbol of the first dance. It was the first act of a husband and wife. It would be then, at that moment, that Penny would realize that they were a married couple, for ever and ever.

And the idea of it made her want to run.

But she had to stay. For everyone. For Sheldon. Penny unhooked her dress from the hanger, delicately stepped into it, fastened it, then looked at herself in the mirror.

Watching Sheldon's first dance with Anna as husband and wife was going to kill her. Penny saw the sadness in her eyes at the thought of it as she studied herself in her jade green bridesmaid's dress. She practiced her best smile at her reflection, forcing the expression onto her face.

Seeing Sheldon dance with Anna, gazing into her eyes with warmth and love, his hand in hers and leading her through the motions he'd rehearsed all for his new bride's sake, was going to break Penny's heart.

Her fake smile slipped away.

2. Like a Bad Dream
Prompt: Birthday

Penny hadn't bothered to let it slip at work that it would be her birthday at the end of the week. To her, that Thursday day was going to be just like all the other days that had dragged by in the past month, and exactly like the following days in the next two, and she didn't want the day flagged as anything else but that.

Her birthday dawned with an unusually bleak, white sunlight slipping out from behind charcoal grey clouds. Perfect, thought Penny. She had found the Pasadena sun very rude to be so cheery when she felt anything but. Now as she rose from her bed on a less than beautiful morning, she thought it very perfect indeed, like the weather was letting her be as miserable as she felt on her birthday. With her family across the country and the people she wanted to spend her birthday with even further away, presently working away in the Arctic Circle, Penny was in no mood to celebrate.

She wanted to ignore anything that showed the slightest hint of celebration. A couple of birthday cards had arrived from her parents and sister. She appreciated the sentiment, but she so didn't want to be reminded of the prospect of spending her birthday on her own, away from them. Away from him, and his whackadoodle ideas of how to celebrate a...

Penny pushed the cards into a kitchen draw, plucked a scarf from the closet, and left for work.

Once there Penny went out of her way to be busy; bussing as many tables as she could and clearing away tables that weren't even her own. She threw herself wholly into every task she set herself in an attempt to ignore the gaping hollow sensation in the pit of her stomach. She should be happy, she should at least celebrate in some small way, she should be doing all these things and more, in the same way she shouldn't be missing her insane neighbours this much and she shouldn't be feeling so... empty.

When Penny finally arrived home that evening ready for a bath and a bad movie, a surprise laying in wait on her doormat made her heart leap. She stooped to collect it, walked it into her apartment, set it on the coffee table, and stared at it.

A vase of beautiful open lilies, white as arctic snow, with a card embedded in the silky petals. After staring at it for what felt like hours, Penny plucked up the courage to detach the envelope.

Dear Penny
Many happy returns. See you soon,
Sheldon
(Dr Sheldon Cooper)

Penny gazed at the printed words until her vision blurred. Suddenly the stab of inexplicable pain she had been battling against overcame her will and twisted deep into her.

It would be another two months until she saw his face or heard his voice again.

Her heart pound in her throat like a fist. Penny had no more energy to resist the tears she had fought for weeks, and they spilled down her cheeks, into her hands, onto Sheldon's words.

Two months.

Penny curled into her couch and cried into her own arms, wishing she could share this supposedly happy occasion with someone – just one person - who was worth it, and with those friends now at the tip of the Earth who to her may as well have been a million miles away.

And she missed him so much.

3. Sweet Discord
Prompt: Drums

Without warning, Sheldon suddenly crashed through Penny's apartment door. She yelped in surprise, the drumsticks fell from her hands and clattered to the floor.

He scanned the room, a flickering plastic light saber poised in his hands ready to strike, expecting the intruders in Penny's apartment to leap into action. But when his eye settled on the monstrosity in the position her couch usually was his stance changed.

"You're not under attack?" he said, a little relieved, straightening up and relaxing his grip on the saber.

Penny wasn't sure if she was flattered by his willingness to protect her, or insulted. "No. Just me in here. And my new drums."

At this Penny she swung round on her stool, collected the sticks, and hit one of the Toms repeatedly. She spun back around and grinned. "See? I'm learning a new instrument."

Sheldon flinched at the loud and hollow noise. "I think that's how African tribes used to convey 'danger' to neighbouring villages?"

Penny stopped hammering. "At least some of it is. The rest of your message is mostly gibberish," he added.

"I've only been playing an hour, I'm not gunna be great right away, am I?"

"Have you learnt nothing from Rock Band?" sighed Sheldon. "To 'drum' in a musical sense is to strike a rhythm in constructed patterns designed to generate a controlled order of processional sounds. You have to strike the membrane, or the 'drum head', with calculated precision else you disrupt the pattern, creating a cacophony of sound, much like sound you are creating. It's about the math."

"Oh yeah?" Penny dubiously slipped off the stool and offered the drumsticks. "Well, if you think you can do better, Math boy."

"Certainly," he said confidently, scooping the sticks from her open palm and perching on the stool. There certainly seemed to be more pedals than he'd been expecting.

His fingers twitched against the roughness of the drumsticks for a few moments, and then, raising his hands high above his head, Sheldon hesitated.

"What?"

"How am I to know which one to hit without the colors on them?" he asked meekly.

He looked so lost. Stifling a giggle Penny leant over him from behind and grasped both his wrists. "Just take my lead," she said as she crossed his arms and guided his right hand to the hi-hat and his left to the snare. With Penny manipulating his hands she helped Sheldon beat out a simple rhythm, finishing it with a crash of the cymbal.

As the crash simmered away Sheldon looked at the drumsticks in his hands in amazement and then gazed up at her brightly. "I liked that," he muttered in awe of his new skill.

4. Moving
Prompt: His spot

The day Sheldon moved in was a Wednesday. Penny remembered this fact vividly, because Wednesday was meatloaf night. To celebrate the move, however, Penny thought she would serve him one of his favourite meals, a simple homemade stew with dumplings like his Mee-Maw used to make, to which Sheldon complained that it was not a Sunday, that stew with dumplings cannot be served on a Wednesday, and why ask for his dinner rota when he moved in if she wasn't going to adhere to it. He ate it anyway, complimenting her on her cooking skills as always, but he remained in a rather morose mood for the rest of the meal.

This was only one of several problems and upsets caused when Sheldon moved into Penny's apartment. It would have been easier if Penny could had moved into 4a with him instead, that way she could have conformed or worked around Sheldon's rigidly regulated life, an ideal move if it weren't for one obstruction: Leonard. Not because he would have been difficult; on the contrary, Leonard had been nothing but supportive of their relationship. Penny just felt, even after all these years, it would have been awkward to live with her ex-boyfriend. And without enough money to move to a new building, that left the wannabe roommates only one other choice.

Wednesday's dinner had not been the only obstacle. When Sheldon went to bed that night, he lay very flat and still on the left, the side he usually slept on whenever he stayed at Penny's. But now he was to call the apartment his too, all of a sudden the left side wasn't good enough anymore, and now the right side of the bed was riddled with kinks and bent springs that made him fidget and convulse. By 1.03am Penny found herself watching late night TV to the sound Sheldon re-arranging her bedroom furniture so the head of the bed faced the North East as his previous bed had done.

But wrong dinners and South facing furniture had been the least of her problems. The change Penny knew would cause Sheldon the most anxiety was the very thing Penny had dreaded most.

Even before they began dating, Sheldon had seriously struggled to find his 'spot' in her living room that met all his seat-related needs. But now he was to spend far more time in apartment 4b his desperation to finally assign himself a seat had blown out of proportion.

The moment the last box was moved across the hall Sheldon started the process of finding the perfect spot. From one chair to another he would hop for hours, changing the degrees of the furniture slightly here, pulling furniture backwards or forwards there. One time she'd caught him adjusting the height of her armchair with some unused coasters he'd found in a cupboard, but nothing was good enough.

And so on Thursday morning he began his strict testing of all the available spaces all over again, and by Friday morning Penny started to wonder if Sheldon couldn't even decide on such a simple thing as a good seat, then maybe it was a sign that Sheldon wasn't happy in her home. He was spending so much time plumping cushions and calculating the angles of her couch Sheldon hadn't even unpacked his X-box yet, or his microscopes, or any of his other sciencey-thingys. What did it mean? Did he not like it here? What if he wanted to move back across the hall?

Then, on Friday evening, Penny heard Sheldon calling her from the living room. She entered to find him sat on the sofa, which had moved several inches closer to the TV, with his arms crooked in the air as if he was holding a giant invisible beach ball.

"Penny, could you spare a few moments, please?"

Curious, Penny inched over to the couch and was indicated to sit down. Slowly, he fit his arms around her, adjusted himself, still he didn't look convinced. He moved again, this time changing his arm positions so one arm was around her and the other resting on the cushions, but his brow furrowed further. After a few more changes, finally Sheldon tucked his legs onto the couch, sank a little deeper and rested his head on Penny's shoulder.

"Ok," he said with a reasonably satisfied tone, burying his head into her collar bone. "This spot seems adequate enough."

But Penny knew Sheldon enough to read what he meant by that. He had found the spot he'd been looking for, and she knew he was more content this his new place then he was letting on. With a grin she rested her head against his and switched on the TV with the remote.

"Welcome home, Sheldon," she smiled.