Story based off of The Big Bang Theory on CBS. Copyright disclaimers all apply.

It's time for a longer story or two. Constructive criticism not just welcomed but encouraged. - Lionne Lovegood


"Enough questions," Penny said, even as she slid a wooden log from the giant Jenga game she and Amy were playing in the middle of her living room out of the stack, "you have to make your choice."

"So let me get this straight," Amy said, reaching up to adjust her hard hat, "There are two roommates. One is short, popular, swarthy, and enjoys singing in the bathtub, while the other is tall, anti-social, pale, neurotic, has esoteric interests, and an obsession with birds? And they both have questionable fashion sense?"

Penny pursed her lips, looking the Jenga tower up and down before lifting on tiptoe to slide her piece on top. "Yup, that's what it boils down to."

Amy waited to see if the slightly swaying tower would fall, but it did not. She started tapping her fingertip on one wooden brick, nudging it inch by inch out of its place. "And at this moment our friendship is dependent on which one of them I decide to marry?"

At this, there was the sound of a thud coming from the hallway. Amy and Penny turned and gazed out the doorway at their respective boyfriends, Sheldon Cooper and Leonard Hofstadter. Leonard was carrying two huge white plastic bags emblazoned with a train logo, and his forehead was furrowed so deeply in confusion that his eyebrows nearly met his hairline. Sheldon was staring at the two of them like a deer in the headlights, the even larger white plastic bag laying at his feet the source of the thump that had caught their attention.

The girls stood sizing the boys up for a heartbeat or two, and then Amy turned to Penny and lifted her hand, pinky curled upwards. "I chose Bert," she said.

Penny finally tore her eyes off Leonard, lifted her own hand and linked her pinky with Amy's, and the two shook, breaking into smiles as they made their oath.

In the hallway, Sheldon turned on Leonard, demanding in an anxious, wounded tone:

"Bert who?"


Eventually, there was the sound of a crash. Leonard and Sheldon looked up from the train tracks they were laying across the living room floor, and within seconds, Penny came waltzing through the door with Amy on her heels.

"Are you sure you don't want to pick that up?" Amy inquired, frowning slightly as she lifted her satchel over her head and placed it on Sheldon's desk chair.

"Oh, I'll get to that later," Penny said airily, even as she stopped to look over the complicated little village that had sprung up on the floor. "Much later," she muttered to herself, crossing her arms as she looked at all of the furniture pushed back against the walls, and then to the train tracks again.

"Knock knock," Sheldon said, shifting to lie on his stomach and snap two pieces of train tracks together. He was wearing his stripped overalls and hat on his head, and didn't break focus from the task he had at hand. "Oh, hello Penny. Hello, Amy. Why please, come in and make yourselves at home."

"Now, now," Amy chided, "No need to be sarcastic. We came over to do a nice thing for you." She held up a brown grocery bag and walked into the kitchen.

"Yeah," Penny said, hopping over two lines of tracks and going to sit cross-legged next to Leonard on the floor. "Amy's decided to cook you dinner."

"I could use some help in the kitchen, bestie," Amy said, even as she started unpacking groceries from the bag.

"Could you?" Penny replied, blue eyes opening wide and innocent, as if she could barely wrap her mind around the concept.

"You're going to cook us dinner?" Leonard asked, sitting up in surprise and knocking over the small forest of plastic trees he had just set up.

Sheldon made a sharp "tsk" of disapproval and gave Leonard a dark look, "We'd be better off if Penny has nothing to do with it," he noted. "Unless we're looking forward to spending our weekend with salmonella poisoning."

"Hey," Penny said, "I've been a waitress for 10 years, and I've never gotten anyone sick with anything." She paused and then added quietly, "That I know of."

Leonard looked at her sidelong, and then set about setting the forest back into place. "I'm sure you haven't," he said confidently.

Penny leaned into him and murmured, "You can't give someone salmonella poisoning by spitting on their burger, can you?"

"Um, no," Leonard replied slowly, finishing with the trees and reaching into the box nearest him to pull out a little red barn, some white fencing and several farm animals. He placed the barn next to the trees and started to lay out the fencing but Sheldon looked up and interrupted him.

"Leonard," Sheldon said, "No one in their right mind would set up a farm so close to some conifers. Where are you going to make room for the fields?"

"Maybe the cows like to spend some time in the shade!" Leonard objected, continuing to lay out his fencing. Penny picked up the box and started to inspect it with a skeptical look on her face.

Amy had gotten out several pots and pans, and injected into the conversation, "Don't mind me, I'll just do this myself."

Apparently, everyone took her up on that, as Sheldon and Leonard got into a heated discussion about the layout of their village, and then whether to name it NiceNoBullyville or Sheldonville, and then about whether to add the ferry attachment when they were clearly building in the countryside and no where near water, but Leonard stood firm on the point that if the town was going to be called Sheldonville than there should be a river called the Waters of Leonard with a nice riverboat on it, and in the meantime Penny put on a puppet show for herself in which the cows, chickens and pigs were putting on a talent competition, and she was in the midst of entertaining a perplexed Leonard and annoyed Sheldon with a little scene from Les Mis when Amy announced that dinner was done. All three of them blinked in surprise, unaware that so much time had already passed.

"Wait!" Sheldon said, putting in the last piece of train tracks, "Just 5 more minutes! The Sheldon Express is almost ready for it's maiden voyage!"

"Well, alright," Amy said, "But I have spaghetti with little hot dogs cut up in it, and you'll want to eat it before it gets cold."

Sheldon sat up straight, looking between his train set and the plates Amy was preparing. Suddenly he sprung to his feet, saying airily, "Maiden voyages are better started in the morning, anyway. Goodnight, Sheldonville!" With that he snapped off the lamp and prowled into the kitchen, coming to loom right over Amy's shoulder and stare at the food as she started adding servings of green beans to everyone's plate.

Penny and Leonard looked at each other, and Leonard gently pried a little pig from Penny's hand and turned it over for inspection. He sang in a very low voice in her ear, "On my oink, pretending you're be-oink me." Leonard put a little treble in his voice, and clasped the pig to his chest, continuing to sing, "All a-oink, I oink with you 'till morning…."

"Leonard," Sheldon said, his tone full of disapproval. He placed forks on all of the plates, and picked two up and brought them over to Penny and Leonard.

Penny, who had been trying her best to smoother a giggle, took her plate and looked up at Sheldon, "What, Sheldon? Does the Roommate Agreement have a provision in it against butchering show tunes?"

"There are clauses which apply," Sheldon replied sternly, giving Leonard a dark look as he passed over his plate, "But unfortunately they don't go into affect until after nine."

Leonard grinned widely at that, and took it as an excuse to go on, plucking up the cow and continuing on, "I mooed a moo in days gone mooooo…."

"Okay, sweetie, that's enough," Penny said, taking the cow and pig away from him again and placing them within the circle of train tracks. She climbed up into the large comfy chair that had been pushed back against the desk under the windows, and began to twirl some spaghetti around her fork. "Amy," she said, "this looks delicious."

Amy carried over Sheldon's plate and her own, and while she went back to the kitchen he sat in his spot on the couch which had been pushed back against the coat closet. Sheldon stopped to poke his fork into the spaghetti, noting, "Spaghetti can be notoriously delicious, Penny. Particularly when it's not crunchy."

Penny gave Sheldon a long look, narrowing her eyes, but he didn't look back at her at all. Instead he took the glasses of Strawberry Quik which Amy had brought over and held them as she sat down and took her own plate.

"Let's all try to settle in for a peaceful dinner for once?" Amy suggested, taking a sip of her bright pink milk.

Much to her surprise, everyone apparently agreed as the room descended into silence as all attention turned towards the food. They ate as people who had not realized they were starving until they had been served, and a companionable peace fell over all four of them as they ate and relaxed, admiring the set of toy train tracks and village that lay assembled on the living room floor.


In the end, Sheldon and Amy had rolled up their sleeves to do the dishes while Penny claimed that Leonard needed to come over to help her restack the giant Jenga game, although by the occasional muffled bangs and thumps coming through the walls, Amy suspected that the stacking they were doing was more horizontal than vertical. She placed the last pot into the dishwasher and Sheldon poured in the soap, closed it and switched the dial to "normal wash."

"Thank you for dinner," Sheldon said, standing back and pulling a long piece of paper towel off their roll. He tore it in half and handed one piece to Amy, then proceeded to dry his own hands carefully.

"My pleasure," Amy said, using her own piece of paper towel to dry her hands. She walked to the waste paper basket, using her toe to flip open the lid. She held it open so that Sheldon could drop his own piece in as well. "Thank you for hosting a lovely dinner. I'll see you on Monday." She started walking over to his desk as she rolled down her sleeves again.

"Monday?" Sheldon asked, sounding surprised. "Why won't I see you tomorrow?"

"Well," Amy said, turning back to look at him as she buttoned her sleeve back demurely around her wrist, "Tomorrow I'm going to a lecture on statistical-mechanical analysis of self-organization and pattern formation during the development of visual maps, given by Klaus Obermayer, at UCLA, with two of my co-workers. Meanwhile, you're going to spend the day playing with your trains." She gave a nod to the sprawling village and train tracks laid out on the floor.

Sheldon also looked at his trains and then back to Amy, and fidgeted. "That doesn't mean you have to go home now, does it? Can't you stay a little longer?"

"It's five minutes past eight," Amy replied, as she fastened the button around her other wrist, "Don't you have an appointment with the laundry room in ten minutes?"

"I do," Sheldon agreed slowly, looking down the hall. He glanced sidelong back at Amy, studying her as she preened carefully, adjusting her green cardigan to show a precise half inch of her flowered Oxford shirt at the sleeves. He shifted a little, and when hesitantly offered his invitation, "You…could come help me sort my laundry? We could keep talking?"

Amy looked up, green eyes widening in surprise. Her heart did a little flutter, and she couldn't keep the shock out of her tone, "You're inviting me into your room?"

"You've been there before," Sheldon shrugged.

Amy seemed to think about it, and then nodded her head in agreement. "I supposed I could help you," she said carefully, even as a tiny smile appeared on her face.

Although it was not to Amy's surprise, it was to her mild disappointment that Sheldon had literally invited her into his room to help with his laundry. They spent the time discussing the merits of the lecture Amy was to see the next day; even though Amy's mind had been on sneaking a look into Sheldon's underwear drawer again, or even trying to lure him into the idea of making out on his bed, before she knew it was she pairing socks and lecturing him on the formation of topographic maps and orientation and ocular dominance columns in the striate cortex while he inspected his clothing carefully and occasionally spritzed stain remover on tee-shirts that looked perfectly immaculate to Amy's eye.

"The formation of orientation and ocular dominance columns is the result of a global instability of the retinoptic projection above a critical value of those order parameters, anyway," Sheldon said, even as Amy finished her tasks and began wandering around the edge of Sheldon's bed to look at the items on one of his multiple chests of drawers.

"Agreed," Amy said, as she peered curiously at a black case and then reached to unlatch it and flip it open. "Oh wow," she breathed, "Is this a Littmann stethoscope?"

Sheldon looked up briefly, and then nodded, "Yes. It's one of the things my aunt gave me when I was a child just in case I needed an occupation to fall back on if I failed as a Theoretical Physicist."

"What a waste of money," Amy said, lifting the ear piece and black rubber tubing out of the box to admire it, "As if you were going to fail at that." She put the stethoscope around her neck and looked at the little dial hanging down between her breasts, lifting it and turning it in her fingers. She gave a little breath of awe and said, "Double-sided, three function chestpiece with a smoke finish."

Sheldon started smiling, glancing up to watch Amy for a moment, pleased both with her knowledge and with her compliment. He said nothing, but he dropped his last tee-shirt into his basket and set down his spray bottle of stain remover. He clasped his hands on both sides of the basket without lifting it, content to spend a few extra seconds watching her with the medical equipment.

"How old were you when you knew what you wanted your career to be?" Amy asked, looking up at him.

Sheldon started a moment, and lifted the basket to his chest. "Four," he answered. "I had started reading the collected works of Einstein, Dirac and Oppenheimer by that time." He paused, and then added delicately, "My Pop Pop bought them for me for my birthday."

Amy nodded a little, and then put both hands on the earpieces, and went to almost put them in her ears, though she paused and looked at him for his permission first. He nodded slightly, and she fastened them into place. She wandered over and placed the chest piece against his heart, and looked up into his eyes, and for a moment they stood there close together, and Amy could quite distinctly discern the increase in his heartbeat, and she did not fail to notice the way his pupils dilated as he looked down at her.

Abruptly, Sheldon stepped back away from her, eyes jerking this way and that as he clutched the laundry basket closer to him.

"Sheldon…" Amy tried to say softly.

"I…I'm behind schedule," Sheldon stammered, turning away and opening his bedroom door. He walked through it, and then walked back and pulled a roll of quarters off his bureau. He walked out again, and got halfway down the hall before he walked back, looking at her with round eyes. "Are you coming?" he inquired, turning on his heel and leaving again before she gave her answer.

"That's the question for the ages," Amy muttered as she took off the stethoscope and draped it back over its case. She shook her head a little and took off after Sheldon, joining him on a silent walk down the stairs to the laundry room in the basement, the air thick with things unspoken.


To be continued. - Lio