Welcome to my new story! I hope you enjoy.

Now for the blanket disclaimer for the entire story: I do not own The Big Bang Theory. I don't own Penny, I don't own Sheldon. If I did they would have hooked up a long time ago. I do own the dvd's and they make me happy. I also own a soft kitty, but she isn't a little ball of fur. She's more like a cranky roommate who wants to sleep on my feet.

It's not as easy as you think it is.

It's not the blessing you think it is.

Most of the time it's a plague, a curse that attacks you without warning.

He first noticed that he was different when he was a child, playing in the park with all the other children.

When playing tag he would get so happy and excited that he would bounce all over the house for hours after being home. When his sister was upset he would cry for hours with her, no matter what the cause was. If his brother got upset he would help him break things. When his father got into one of his moods, he was the first to know.

It was inherited from his MeeMaw, who explained it to him as gently as she could.

He could feel what other people felt, experience as if it was first hand. In time he would learn control. He would be able to put up shields that would keep people from bombarding him with their thoughts, feelings and emotions.

So every day before school Sheldon Cooper would walk down the street to his grandmother's house and practice control. Every day he would try to put a bubble around himself, a shield to keep other people away from him. He pictured a shade of blue that scarily matched Luke Skywalker's lightsaber before the movie was remastered enveloping him and protecting him. And it worked.

It worked until Sheldon's extra-ordinary brilliance caught up with him. Scholarships afforded him free schooling and he jumped at the opportunity to learn more, to be more than he ever thought he would. Phone calls and letters transferred lessons from one to the other. Summers came and while visiting he would make leaps and bounds learning control. The downside being that when he left for school his studies took up most of his time. One step forward two steps back, as Meemaw put it in one of her letters. It wasn't very effective, but it did get the job done.

Until Meemaw passed away that is.

He was in Germany at the time as a guest lecturer. He was ignoring the indifferent and bored sensations that the majority of the class was giving him and was focusing on the four or five students that were interested and paying attention. They deserved his brilliance even if the others didn't. In the middle of his lesson pain and immediate loss crashed into him like a title wave, it was so strong and wild that it completely covered any other sensation he was focusing on.

Ending the class early Sheldon called home the second he reached his room. Missy answered, throat raw from uncontrollable sobbing. She tells him in between heaving that Meemaw was gone. Shakily he informs the family that he will be home as soon as he could. Hanging up the phone he collapses to the floor, crying himself to sleep.

The funeral is a nightmare. Sheldon himself is too raw to exert any kind of control, he shields are down completely. His family's grief is so overwhelming he refuses to stand near them. Others are crying, mourning the only woman who would accept you no matter what. Some are there simply out of respect for the dead. It was the two women in the back that got to him.

Self-righteous at its highest form, he could feel the two older women laughing. They were happy she was gone, thought she was fake and were so negative that he couldn't focus on anyone else anymore.

His brother offers to take him to a bar when it's over, and Sheldon gratefully accepts. Anything to make the feelings go numb. They didn't go away though.

If anything, in a way Sheldon can never fully explain, alcohol seems to have the opposite affect on him. He felt it all. Every person at the bar is broadcasting at a level that he can't tolerate. He is in a room full of screaming, crying idiots. All of them obsessed with drinking away the day or the next sexual exploit that was sure to go their way. Too many feelings running in his head, almost as if each one had a particular level of hell made just for him. He stumbles out of the bar and sits in the bed of his brother's truck, waiting for him to follow.

It's there that he meets the person that turns him into a man. Grieving, drunk, and feeding off of her need for physical contact Sheldon welcomes her with open arms. His first time is not a pleasant one and it ends before it even really begins. Disappointment comes off of her in ripples. It's one thing to guess that she fakes it, quite another to know for a fact that someone finds you lacking. Sheldon is embarrassed and offers to help her, but can already tell she will say no. In three days word gets back to his mother who writes it off as the wrong way to grieve and forces him to go to church five days in a row to ask God's forgiveness.

With no one to help him learn control and no one to really talk to about his so called gift, Sheldon relaspes hard. He doesn't even try to recapture the control and concenration it takes to be social. The boy who has once thrived on having friends and being social now does everything he can to avoid it. Different mannerisms are studied and copied to keep people from him. His intelligience isolated him to a certain point, but Sheldon always worked to overcome it. Now he welcomes it with open arms.

The isolation is welcomed until he realizes that he is a husk of what he used to be, no interaction is almost worse than too many people. Instead of having other people and their moods attacking them, it was just his thoughts and feelings. It's too lonely. Sheldon realizes that being an empath he must be around people, it's a part of his 'condition'. Without people he doesn't feel anything. With them he feels too much.

Once he permanetly moved out of his mother's house and into his own apartment, the silence was deafening. A slightly social roommate seemed to be the perfect solution.

Enter Leonard Hofstadter, a man who always wanted to sit at the cool table but always knew that he never could. Thanks to Leonard's mother the man was always trying to please. This meant that he wouldn't touch Sheldon's things; that could amount to torture when the man was in a bad mood. He also refrained from touching him, something Sheldon couldn't abide. Feelings were too raw, whispers of thoughts would float through his mind when skin to skin contact was initiated. Sheldon knew what Leonard really thought of him no matter how hard he tried not to. Smug, anti-social, egotistical to name a few. The real Sheldon was far from it, but only glimpses of that were ever shown.

Out of Leonard's friends, only Howard and Raj were tolerable. Howard was constantly thinking with his penis, something Sheldon had learned at an early age how to tune out thanks to a brother who was six years older than him. Raj was a genuinely sweet person, although he did have a lot of dark moods and thoughts that Sheldon would help him block when they threatened to overwhelm the poor man.

For four years the life that Sheldon had created worked. His mildly social friends gave him enough human interaction to make life livable, and it also gave him the isolation that he would crave when their feelings became too much for one person to handle. Everything was going according to plan in Sheldon's life and for the first time since the death of his Meemaw he gained a small amount of contentment in his life. Not happiness, but a mild satisfaction.

Satisfaction until one day it hit him like a slap across the face. He was talking about stairs of all things, trying to gain a reprieve from Leonard's imagined slight of the day when it slammed into his being. Pure feminine, the aura almost pulsed around him, daring him to come closer. Determination with muted disappointment floated down the stairs to caress him on the second floor. Pessimism with slight undertones of relief gave him a hug on the third floor landing. Doing his best to ignore what could only be described as an assault Sheldon focused on the tasks at hand; up the stairs, unlock the door, water from the fridge, then Battlestar Galactica with commentary. Bee stings of lust so palatable that Sheldon himself became slightly aroused bit through the remaining of his defenses.

Leonard was staring at the open doorway, completely entranced with whomever was the new occupant. Sheldon gave a slight frown before turning to see what the big deal was. He would miss the old neighbor, and getting used to new auras would exhaust him for a few weeks. He ignored Leonard and tried to narrow his so-called gift on the person in the apartment. The quicker he was used to the new presence the better. It was like the presence on the stairway, but stronger. A sense of comfort and security swirled around him for the first time since Germany. Startled, he looked up and met the eyes of the person who he felt two floors down.

"Hi, I'm Penny." She told them with a small smile of greeting.

Sheldon knew then that whatever she was, she was the beginning of the end of the mild satisfaction his life had become.