Leonard Leaky Hofstadter, Ph.D., tilted his head slightly at the mangled marshmallow in his left hand. Brow quirked, he had to conclude, no matter how he looked at it, that it didn't quite look the way he had wanted and intended. It had been a lot harder than he had thought to cut a marshmallow in a very specific shape. He tried to lift his spirits as he considered the effects of the vacuum. Maybe as the candy expanded and seemingly grew, it would take on a clearer heart shape. He smiled to himself as he considered the idealistic possibility. The physicist's smile disappeared. Who was he kidding? The mangled shred of what had once been a pink and rectangular piece of candy wouldn't look more like a little heart enlarged than it did before.
He frowned as he tried to fix the damage that he had done and tried to make the heart shape more symmetrical. As he retracted the worn pair of scissors and held up the smaller, heart-shaped marshmallow, Leonard had to confirm to himself that at least he had not made it worse. Success. He smiled widely as he eyed the effort.
Either way, he had very much tried to make the best of the situation in his own little, awkward and nerdy way, and he knew Penny would at least appreciate his efforts in doing so. He had not chosen for the opening of the new Physics lab to be the fourteenth of February. He had not seen it as a ways of attracting High School students, least of all towards an education in Physics, and he had most definitely not chosen to be at the lab all day on Saturday to try and entertain a bunch of disinterested teenagers with little experiments while he could have stayed in bed with Penny until she had to go and work the lunch and a part of dinner shifts at The Cheesecake Factory.
He had done his best to surprise her with fresh orange juice and a few slices of French toast that morning before he had to go, too, but Penny had had to scrape or cut off several burned pieces. Despite the fact that he had been far less successful than he would have liked, he knew the effort had meant a lot. He was still a tad unhappy about it, though. Penny's soft smiles and little kisses had, of course, helped, as had her lack of grumpy attitude, despite the still-early hour ── Leonard had doubted whether or not to wake her up and offer her his attempts at a nice and self-cooked meal for a little while, because he hadn't wanted to risk getting his girl in a grumpy mood ── but he wanted to do something nice for her, himself. He had reserved a table at a nice eating house in half an hour, one that he had made sure had very good reviews, but whether or not the food would be good wouldn't be his efforts, technically.
That is when the sound of high heels upon the tiled floor by the new Physics lab shook Leonard from his thoughts. The event had ended over an hour ago, and the halls were, once again, abandoned, aside from the few late-working Master's or Doctorate students who still wanted to work on their theses, only moving from their chosen spot to get more strong coffee, to be able to stay up and work all night. He knew he had pulled some all-nighters, too. These footballs, however, he recognized as his partner's.
He made for the light switch, the only light in the room from a Bunsen burner on the table before him. He straightened up as he began to feel suddenly nervous. Please, let it go right. Please.
"Leonard?"
"In here!" Leonard called as a response to Penny's query, and as he saw the lab door move, inwards, he changed his mind at the last second and ran away from his desk, to meet Penny there, leaving his heart-shaped marshmallow and worn old scissors on the table, pushing the latter aside, away from immediate view. The few meters in-between the wooden desk and the door proved enough as a distance for Leonard to slam his leg against the leg of one of the shiny new chairs along his path. When Penny's eyes fell on him, the physicist was hissing from pain and hopping on one leg, holding onto the other.
"Leonard? What──?"
"Penny!" Leonard interrupted, putting his foot down on the floor again, doing his best to mask the pain he felt shooting up his leg as he smiled through gritted teeth. "Good evening!" he greeted and extended his hand for her to take it, so that he could guide her to the desk, by the Bunsen burner. Watching her from the corners of his eyes, Leonard saw the confusion on her face. His car was at the garage to be fixed, so Raj had gotten him to work, and Penny was coming to get him. She had, obviously, thought that that was going to be all.
Coming to a stop by the desk, Leonard reached for the marshmallow in the weird heart shape and held it before Penny's face. "Watch," he ordered and turned back to the desk. Carefully, he lifted the tall glass bell jar up and placed the mangled little marshmallow underneath it before he activated the device. As he did, he saw the effects nearly immediately, and he smiled, goofily, as the marshmallow grew, and grew, and grew... seemingly so.
He turned back to Penny when it was at least a few times larger than it had been. "That is what my heart does when I'm with you!" he said. "You see, when you put an object that can expand in a vacuum, it will take its 'full size', without any pressure of gravity and all other earthly forces that, technically, reduce it, like ── well, not like my thorax is vacuum when I'm with you, but──"
He was shut up by Penny's lips, curved in a little smile, upon his. He placed both of his hands on her hips to pull her closer as she slid her hands in his very dark hair and pressed her lips more firmly against his as they moved together. He assumed that the first of his little experiments had been successful. Torn between the need he felt to be with Penny and his desire to put a smile on her face, to do something nice for her, he broke away from the kiss, offering up a small smile as his response to her more confused, somewhat offended, expression. The way she crossed her arms was an indication already.
"Move a bit back. I don't want for you to get hurt," Leonard stated, and he waited patiently until she had, at last, abided before he addressed the Bunsen burner and the small Petri dish beside it, picking it up and taking a few small fragments of steel and other, well-chosen materials between thumb and forefinger, eyeing Penny and winking before he threw the slivers into the fire.
Taken by Penny and the desire to watch her reaction, he, however, stood too close to the Bunsen burner, and that combined with the fact that he had forgotten to put on his safety goggles, what followed was inevitable. At first, colorful sparks flew from the Bunsen burner flame. Then, however, Penny's face changed from anticipation and surprise to shock as he felt a very intense warmth by his forehead and jumped back, batting at his brow and yelling much like a cave man. Penny was on it right away, forcing him to pull the hand he held over his eyebrow away and taking a look at the damage. He only grudgingly let go to let her see.
The blonde couldn't suppress a smile and held a hand before her curved lips, doing her very best not to burst into laughter at the sight of the physicist with his half-singed eyebrow. "Oh, Leonard..." she said.
"Oh, what?"
She shook her head. "Nothing," she answered, too quickly. Leonard was Leonard. He would always be nerdy and very clumsy and adorable and all of the things that had made her fall in love with him. She wouldn't want him to be any other way. "Maybe we should go back home before going to The Royce. It is close, so we will make it."
"Why?" Leonard asked as he grumpily turned off the vicious Bunsen burner and the vacuum sucking device, setting both items aside. How stupid had he been to believe he could ever even begin to turn physics to his advantage in his love life... He knew that he should have just left it all up to the cook at The Royce and other people who were actually qualified to do something right for Penny on Valentine's Day. He shouldn't have bothered.
"Well..." Penny started, thinking of the right words to tell him what had happened and exactly what the result was, but then she changed her mind. There was nothing to fix ── not really. If he didn't show up with a half-singed eyebrow or other unanticipated results from one of his and his friends' weird experiments sometimes, he wouldn't be Leonard. Those strange incidents were reminders of why she loved him, half-singed eyebrow or not.