THE DARK MATTER THEORY: THE PARAMETER DEFINITION

By Stephen Tannhauser

Description: Would-be actress Penny discovers her new neighbours Sheldon and Leonard have all sorts of wonderful geeky interests . . . and one very dark secret that will change her life forever.

Disclaimer: The author does not own THE BIG BANG THEORY or any of the characters. Much of the dialogue in this story is adapted from the screenplay for the Pilot Episode, written by Chuck Lorre and Bill Prady.

- 2 -

Penny hadn't made up her mind yet whether these last few days had been the worst of her life or the best, but with the discovery that the shower in her new unit wasn't working, the balance was definitely tilting towards the negative. A long afternoon of toting boxes and furniture up three flights of stairs had left her feeling distinctly grimy and sweaty, and realizing that she'd left her first and last month's rent cash at Kurt's place hadn't improved her mood. She picked up one of her magazines and fanned herself with it; she'd left both window and door open to get a cross-breeze going, but it wasn't helping much.

She blew out a breath and put the magazine down. Things could be worse, after all. It was a beautiful day, she was young, she was hot, a new phase of her life was starting, she had finally gotten that bastard Kurt behind her, and for all she knew, tomorrow could be the day she was discovered by a movie mogul at the Cheesecake Factory—hell, if they could pick Pamela Anderson off the JumboTron at a Canadian football game, anything was possible, right? A little sweat and grunge was something she could put up with, for that.

Voices from the hall outside caught her attention; she glanced over, raising her eyebrows. The landlord had told her two guys shared the apartment beside hers, which had worried her a moment until he'd reassured her. Totally harmless, he'd said. Big dweebs, both of 'em; don't do noisy parties, never bring girls back, always pay rent on time. Might be a couple, for all I know, he'd added thoughtfully.

Well, from the way these guys were gawping at her, it certainly seemed like they might have no idea how to talk to women. They'd definitely never taken any fashion advice from one: the tall, blue-eyed guy was wearing a superhero shirt and plaid pants that should never have left the circus, and the short bespectacled guy was wearing a purple-and-green hoodie that did nothing for his colouring and clashed horribly with the burgundy T-shirt. Shame, really; they were both kinda cute, in an endearing geeky-little-brother sort of way. She smiled. "Oh, hi!"

The awkward volley of exchanged "Hi"s only confirmed the landlord's "dweeb" diagnosis, as did their names when she finally got them. Leonard and Sheldon, huh? Still, it was kind of a nice change from Kurt and his pack to deal with guys who were at least trying to be polite and respectful. And it never hurt to make friends with your neighbours. "Maybe we can have coffee sometime," she finished, and politely shooed them out, closing the door firmly on an equally awkward fusillade of "Goodbye"s. She turned and leaned back against it, blowing out a breath, and smiled despite herself.

Then she looked around at the empty, quiet apartment, at the scattered boxes, the piles of clothes, the off-angled furniture. Nothing moved. Penny's smile faltered and disappeared.

For the first time, it struck her that in her entire life, she hadn't ever lived completely alone. She'd always lived either with her parents, or with Kurt. In the wake of discovering Kurt's infidelity her sheer, infuriated need to just be somewhere, anywhere else had driven her through the entire process of moving out and finding a new place. But it hadn't hit her until now what that meant. Nobody to share coffee with in the kitchen. Nobody to hear moving around the living room or watching TV while she fell asleep. Nobody to come home to.

Nobody to help her turn this place into a home.

She shook her head and took a deep breath. It was okay. This was just—what did shrinks like to say?—this was just another part of the process. And an empty apartment beat an apartment with Kurt in it—or his belly-ringed Goth chippie, come to that. The irritation renewed her energy, and she returned to unpacking, trying hard to keep her mind on positive things. But it was more difficult than she expected, and the knock on the door came almost as a relief.

"Hi. Again," said Leonard, when she opened the door. Sheldon hovered behind him, looking anxious.

"Hi!" She was surprised at herself at how genuinely pleased she was to see the guys again, if nothing else because they were so completely different from Kurt and Kurt's friends—though it turned into amusement when they cycled through another round of "Hi"s. Didn't these guys know how to talk to women at all?

"Anyway, um. We brought home Indian food," said Leonard, holding up a takeout bag. "And, um, I know that moving can be stressful, and I find that when I'm undergoing stress, that good food and company can have a comforting effect. Also, curry is a natural laxative, and I don't have to tell you that, uh, a clean colon is just one less thing to worry about!" He grinned awkwardly, not quite able to meet her eyes.

Penny tilted her head. Had she just been offered a meal, or an enema?

Sheldon leaned down closer to Leonard's ear. "Leonard, I'm no expert here," he muttered, "but I believe in the context of a luncheon invitation you might want to skip the reference to bowel movements."

"Oh, you're inviting me over to eat?" Penny said. "Oh, that's so nice! I'd love to!" Nor was it any kind of a lie; she hadn't eaten much today and only now was her appetite finally coming back. And the thought of company was more welcome than she'd realized, too.

"Great!" said Leonard, smiling back at her. He really was kind of cute, when he forgot to be nervous. She grinned at him, closed her door and headed past them towards the door to their apartment. "So, what do you guys do for fun around here?"

"Well, today we exorcised a malevolent spiritual entity who was using a helpless receptionist to corrupt samples at a sperm bank so the children would grow up more vulnerable to possession," said Sheldon. Penny stopped in the door to 4A, turned and gaped at him. Sheldon paused, then gave a strained grin. "Bazinga."

She looked at Leonard, who was holding one hand over his face. "That's, uh, that's Sheldon's way of saying he's kidding," said Leonard, looking aggravated and embarrassed at once.

"Yes, I'm experimenting with different models of humour," said Sheldon. "That was absurd exaggeration, as you can probably gather." He shrugged, then delivered his punchline in a studiedly casual tone. "All we actually did today was masturbate for money."

Had Penny been less hungry—and truth told, less lonely—that line might well have sent her right back into her apartment behind a locked door. But the blithe unawareness in Sheldon's face that he might have said anything wrong, and Leonard's utterly humiliated cringe, somehow made it all too ridiculously funny to find offputting. She'd wanted to get to know people who wouldn't remind her of Kurt; well, you couldn't ask for better in that line than these guys, now could you?

Inside the apartment, the feeling of having walked into a different world persisted. It was strange, but the place just felt safe; she couldn't have put her finger on why, but it felt more like an honest-to-God home than anyplace she'd lived or visited since coming out here. Like there were strong sturdy walls all around, far thicker than mere plaster and insulation, protecting them all. The neatness and precision of the unit's layout, the sheer volume of all its books, games and entertainment, and the mind-boggling complexity of the equations on the whiteboards were like nothing she'd ever encountered . . . as was Sheldon's explanation for why he didn't like people sitting in his spot on the couch, which she'd done before he'd had a chance to stop her. Fortunately, Leonard had clearly had some practice in compensating for his roommate, and managed to keep the conversation moving, albeit with some clumsiness.

Like, for example, the game they'd just mentioned, which despite herself she just had to ask about. "Klingon Boggle?"

"Yeah, it's like regular Boggle but . . . in Klingon," said Leonard, flushing deeply. Which was more or less what Penny had thought, but she was developing a real appreciation for Leonard's moments of embarrassment; he just looked so cute, like a puppy who wanted to hide in the corner. "That's probably enough about us. Tell us about you!"

Well, that was a more loaded topic than they probably realized. Still, not like it wouldn't have come up eventually. "Um, me, okay, I'm a Sagittarius, which probably tells you way more than you need to know . . . ."

"Yes, it tells us that you participate in the mass cultural delusion about how the Sun's apparent position relative to arbitrarily defined constellations and the time of your birth somehow affects your personality," said Sheldon. "Which is of course ludicrously oversimplified and generalized; the exact assessment of how the inertial-gravitational distribution of mass and energy in local spacetime affects the psychic landscape at the second of a mind's first conscious manifestation can't possibly be boiled down into twelve signs and would require so much astronomical observation and calculation that it wouldn't be worth the effort . . . ." He trailed off, perhaps noticing the way her jaw had dropped.

"How the inertial-gravitational what?" Penny finally said, faintly.

"I think what Sheldon's trying to say is, Sagittarius wouldn't have been our first guess," interposed Leonard, smiling kindly at her.

"Oh. Yeah, a lot of people do think I'm a Water sign," Penny admitted, though from the glares Leonard and Sheldon were shooting each other she was quite sure it wasn't that simple. She decided to try to move past it. "Okay, let's see, what else; oh, I'm a vegetarian, except for fish, and the occasional steak—I love steak . . . ." She told them about her job, about her screenplay, and about coming from Nebraska to be an actress. ". . . and, um, that's about it," she finished, a lot more quickly than she'd expected. "That's the story of Penny."

And oh, Christ, once you left out Kurt, cow-tipping and growing up on the farm, it really was, wasn't it. Was that all there was to her?

"Well, it sounds wonderful," said Leonard encouragingly.

"It was," said Penny. "Until I fell in love with a jerk." And completely to her own shock, she burst into tears.

She could feel the aghast silence from Sheldon and Leonard, and couldn't blame them; how would anybody feel if the nice new neighbour you'd invited into your home suddenly broke down out of nowhere? Hiccupping through her sobs, she tried to explain. "Oh, God, you know, four years I lived with him. Four years! That's, like, as long as high school!"

"It took you four years to get through high school?" said Sheldon blankly.

"Don't!" Leonard snapped.

Penny wasn't really listening. "I just—I can't believe I trusted him," she gulped, ignoring their mutters back and forth. "But you want to know the most pathetic part? When it really came down to it, I knew he was cheating on me. I'd seen the signs, I'd heard it from friends, I'd caught him lying about where he was. But somehow, whenever I was with him, it all just . . . went out of my head. Like it stopped mattering and I couldn't even think about it. Is that crazy?"

She'd asked hoping for reassurance, though she had enough of a read on Sheldon now that she half-expected him simply to say Yes it is. What she hadn't expected was for both Sheldon and Leonard to sit upright and exchange an alarmed look. It reminded her of the doctors on House, when they heard about the symptom that explained everything, or when the cops on Law & Order recognized a suspect's name. She frowned at them. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing," said Leonard, seeming to come to himself with a start. "No, Penny, look, you're not crazy. It's just, uh, it's a paradox. And paradoxes are part of nature. Think about light. Now if you look at Huygens, light is a wave, as confirmed by the double-slit experiments, but then along comes Albert Einstein and proves that light behaves like particles too . . . ." Now it was his turn to trail off at her expression. "Well, I didn't make it worse," he muttered at Sheldon.

Penny managed a smile. She sort of thought she got his point, and even if she didn't, his evident concern for somebody he'd only just met was touching. "God, I'm so sorry," she said. "I'm such a mess. And on top of everything else I'm all gross from moving, and my stupid shower doesn't even work . . . ."

"Our shower works," volunteered Leonard. Sheldon snapped to look at him with an aghast gape.

Penny blinked. "Really? Would it be totally weird if I used it?" That got yet another duel of rapid-fire monosyllables, Yes-No-No?!-No-No, but ended with Leonard directing her to the room in question. She smiled in thanks and went to the bathroom, already happily imagining the blessed feel of hot water on her skin.

It was a good thing these guys were such nerds, she thought. Guys like Kurt would have taken a request to use their shower as an invitation for them to join her, more often than not.


"Well, this is an interesting development," said Sheldon.

"Because you think her boyfriend's Nocturnis?" said Leonard. "Look, I agree it sounds suspicious and I'd like to think that too, but we didn't get any news about anybody showing up on the radar yet, and even if he is, we've got no evidence he's broken the Pax. All we know is that she's . . . ." Leonard paused, trying to think of a diplomatic way to phrase it. ". . . prone to maybe not making the wisest decisions when it comes to bed partners," he finished.

"Well, then, that should be good news as far as you're concerned," Sheldon snarked.

"What?!"

"Oh, please. Did you think your objectives in inviting her over weren't patently transparent, Leonard? For all your protestations of friendship your primary interest is carnal, don't deny it."

"I can and will deny it, and so what if it was?" Leonard challenged, somewhat inconsistently.

Sheldon glared at him in exasperation. "Even if we stipulated that you stood a chance with this woman, which I don't, you're well aware of the risks and practical difficulties of any intimate relationship given our current vocation. That's part of the reason they recruit people like us in the first place, you know that!"

"It's not unheard of," countered Leonard. "And besides, who says I don't stand a chance? I'm a man, she's a woman."

"Yes, but not of the same species."

"Look, I'm not going to engage in hypotheticals here," Leonard growled. "I'm trying to be a good neighbour. That's all." His conscience nagged him enough to make him add, "That's not to say that if a carnal relationship were to develop that I wouldn't participate . . . however briefly."

Sheldon shrugged. "You're the one who converted to a Church which holds non-marital intercourse and contraception to be mortal sins, Leonard. If that doesn't trouble you, I'm not going to bother you further about it."

"Yes, but fortunately I also converted to a Church which includes a sacrament that allows us to get forgiveness for such things." Leonard folded his arms smugly.

"Provided you're sincerely contrite about it," Sheldon countered. "If you do manage to sleep with Penny at some unspecified future date, are you really going to be able to tell your confessor in all sincerity that you're sorry you did it?"

Leonard was spared from answering the question by the door bursting open. Howard and Raj piled in, Howard waving a VHS cassette at them. "Wait 'til you see this!" he declared without preamble.

"It's fantastic. Unbelieveable," Raj agreed.

"See what?" asked Leonard, frowning.

"It's a Stephen Hawking lecture from MIT in 1974," said Howard. "One of the last ever recorded before he became a cr-EEE-PY com-PUUU-terr VOIsse." He grinned at his own imitation of Hawking's vocoder, as he always did.

"That does sound fantastic, but this is not a good time," said Sheldon. "You need to get your Order equipment, and we all need to go."

"What? Where?" said Howard. "Why?" Raj chimed in.

"Because there's a naked woman in our shower," said Sheldon, "and I have profound suspicions about her ex-boyfriend."

Howard grinned. "Yeah, right, naked woman in the shower; your grandmother back in town, Leonard?"

"Gentlemen, I'm serious," said Sheldon flatly. "I have reason to suspect our new neighbour has been dating a Nocturnis of unspecified genus. Once she's finished her ablutions I propose we get her previous address from her and go over to verify whether there is, in fact, any public danger."

"She lived with him for four years, Sheldon," Leonard argued. "If she didn't notice anything or take any harm over all that time, what are the odds there was anything to see?"

Sheldon raised his eyebrows. "So you're staking the safety of our city on Penny's mental acuity and observational skills, Leonard? For that matter, we'll need to make sure she hasn't picked up any critical contagions as soon as we can."

"Wait a minute, wait a minute," Howard interrupted. "There actually is a woman here?"

Sheldon rolled his eyes. "Yes, in the shower. Good grief, Howard, your listening skills need serious work."

"And you want us to take care of her ex so that the way's clear for your own coitus?" Howard pressed.

"I'm not attempting to achieve coitus, Howard!" Leonard snapped.

"So she's available for coitus?"

Sheldon grimaced. "Oh, gentlemen, can we please stop wasting time on the topic of coitus?"

"Wouldn't that be coitus interruptus?" came an amused voice from the hall. They snapped around; Penny lounged against the wall, her arms folded, a towel wrapped around her body. She arched an eyebrow slyly at Leonard. "Nice to know what you guys talk about while I'm out of the room."

Leonard's face burned as if an oven had opened under his chin. "Penny, I—"

"Ah, don't worry about it," said Penny, waving a hand. "At least you waited until I left the room." She jabbed a thumb over her shoulder at the bathroom. "I just wanted to know if there's a trick to getting it to switch from bath to shower, I can't get it to work. Hi, guys." She waved cheerfully at Howard and Raj, clearly enjoying their poleaxed looks. "I'm Penny."

"Enchanté, mademoiselle," said Howard, the first to recover, as he always was when women were involved. He leant casually on the wall, his silver, blue-gemmed ring flashing in the sunlight from the window. "Howard Wolowitz, CalTech Department of Applied Physics. You may be familiar with some of my work; it's currently orbiting Jupiter's largest moon taking high-resolution digital photographs."

"Cool," said Penny, raising her eyebrows. "I work at the Cheesecake Factory. Sometimes I take photos of birthday parties."

Leonard decided he'd better cut this off before Howard found another way to put his foot in his mouth, or worse, Penny noticed that Howard and Raj wore the same rings he and Sheldon did. "Come on," he said. "I'll show you the trick with the shower."

"Bon douche!" called Howard. "That's French for 'good shower'. I can express the same sentiment in seven languages."

Sheldon looked distinctly aggravated. "One of those had better not be the ur-Logos, Howard."

"What?" Howard scowled. "Just because you don't know how to have fun with your working tools . . . ." The squabbling trailed off as Leonard led Penny back down to the bathroom, trying to ignore her puzzled look back over her shoulder. Maybe Sheldon was right and this had no hope of going anywhere, but it would be nice to at least get a date or two out of it first.


In the bathroom, Leonard wiggled the switch until he felt it catch; the stream of water switched from faucet to showerhead. "There it goes," he said. "It sticks, I'm sorry, I—" He turned just in time to see the towel fall and the barest flicker of Penny's body before she disappeared behind the shower. "Oh! You're just going to step right—okay, I'll, um . . . ." He trailed off, then got up and headed for the door.

"Hey, Leonard?" Penny called, just as he put his hand on the doorknob.

The reflex habits of lifetime insecurity betrayed him. "Penny, I'm so sorry about the whole 'coitus' thing out there," he found himself babbling, "that's really just Howard, I hope you realize I'd never—you know, I wouldn't do anything, well, untoward, and I, uh, I . . . ."

"Leonard." Penny stuck her head around the shower curtain, sodden hair framing her face. She grinned. "It's okay. Really. I actually just wanted to ask you a favour."

"A favour." Leonard slumped in relief. Well, he hadn't blown it so far. "A favour, sure, you can ask me a favour; I'd do a favour for you."

"It's okay if you say no," Penny assured him earnestly.

"Oh, I'll probably say yes." To his own surprise, Leonard found himself returning her grin, his look half rueful, half amused.

Penny's eyebrows shot up; then her own grin broadened. "I'm only saying because it's not the sort of thing you normally ask a guy you just met . . . ." Her eyelids lowered, and she gave her head a slight coquettish tilt. The look touched off a startling warmth in Leonard's gut. He felt dazed. Was this actual, successful flirting they were doing here? Was this that so-called "chemistry" he'd heard so much about and never understood? Images of loofahs, soap, and slippery curves filled his head.

"Well," he said, doing his best to look cool and casual, "I'm not the normal sort of guy." Thankfully, he just barely kept his voice from cracking. "So please. Ask whatever you'd like."

"Good." Penny's grin changed to something slightly sheepish; she dropped her eyes and ran one fingertip along the edge of the shower curtain. "Well, I was kinda hoping . . . that you'd, well . . . that you'd like to join me . . . ." Leonard's breath stopped. ". . . when I go back to my old place to get some money from my ex."

A mental record needle scraped an earsplitting screech across Leonard's brain. At last he found his voice. "You, uh . . . what?"

"You and the guys," Penny clarified. To her credit, she at least had the grace to look a little embarrassed. "Just for some backup, so he can't be his normal dickish self about it if he wants to. And some moral backup for me, too, in case he decides to be charming and I get tempted to forgive him again." She looked up through her eyelashes again. "Please?"

Leonard closed his eyes and sighed. I'm a defender of humanity against the forces of supernatural evil, God, he thought, aiming the remark skywards. If that isn't going to get me out of the "friend zone," what is?

There was no answer. There never was, for prayers like that.

TO BE CONTINUED