"I predicted it." Sheldon said, faintly triumphant. "Sometimes it is such a burden to be correct so often. Five months and three more weeks left of them awkwardly avoiding each other in the hall."
Leonard ignored him, hunching further over the videogame controller. He'd pulled the white armchair close to the TV, creating a physical barrier that separated himself from the rest of his room. The numbness that he'd been chasing hadn't stuck.
"One week in and it's already a pain in the ass..." Howard muttered.
Leonard tried turning up the volume, drowning out the voices behind him with rapid gunfire and explosions. He could practically feel Sheldon's disapproving glare on the back of his neck.
Raj paused, fork part way to his mouth. "What the hell was it this time, dude?" He asked, raising his voice to project over the game.
"It's a disturbing pattern." Sheldon supplied unhelpfully.
"What?"
"A pattern. A customary behaviour, a reoccurring event or object in an arrangement. Here I was referring to Leonard's repetitive actions."
"Thank you," Leonard said sarcastically, hitting pause on the game and glaring back at his supposed friends. "I know what a pattern is. But I don't think you get it." They couldn't understand how badly this was hurting him too; this was what he had to do – like cutting off a gangrenous limb. It was a painful struggle. And they mocked him.
"Oh I understand the pattern quite well now. I've been observing it for over three years." Sheldon started erasing his whiteboard. "I can graphically display it," the tall scientist offered helpfully.
"No, I'm over it. I'm over her. I just need some time away..." The sounds of the game started up again.
"Leonard, Leonard, Leonard..." Sheldon said softly, shaking his head. His condescending smile was firmly fixed onto his face.
"I am!" Leonard protested, his voice treading dangerously into whining territory. "This ends it. I'm done. I am not waiting around to have my heart broken again. I'm not going to –"
"Were you dating her?" Sheldon pointed out. "Your byzantine response to her actions suggests that you feel slighted by a breach of social contract."
Leonard scowled. He hit pause again. Slowly, he turned to glare at Sheldon over his shoulder. "No. Not technically." He growled.
"Well then..." Sheldon raised an eyebrow, poised with the marker at the white board. The marker squeaked as Sheldon etched out an axis.
Leonard did NOT want to get into this with his friends. Usually, Sheldon didn't care enough to pester him, but having Raj and Howard as an audience seemed to appeal to his ego, his need to prove his superior knowledge in this field as well.
"Look. I laid it all on the line. I told her how I felt. She didn't feel the same way."
Eye rolling. For some reason his statement didn't have the impact that he wanted it to have. Leonard slowly realized that his friends had been hearing this story for a long time now. How could he get them to understand? He didn't want to talk about it. He struggled to attain that sense of numbness; of not caring. Anything that could be used as a defence against this wretched desolation.
Leonard's voice was shaky, faintly breaking under the pain. "Don't you get it? I told her that I loved her. She... left. It wasn't a 'hmm, I don't feel like saying that yet but-I-really-care-about-you', she, she just dropped me and walked out of my life yet again, picked up that idiot again, and is now trying to get back into my life with him like nothing happened. Again. She can sit there and kiss him and stare at me and I don't know, just ignore the fact that she knows I love her and she's killing me with what she's doing!" he put down the controller. "I can't just accept that – I can't accept her doing that! You know what? I know that none of you get it. Ok? Here. TV's yours." Leonard pushed the chair back with his feet and with his head down, headed back to his room.
Fuck. Even after a week this was hard. The words just wouldn't get out of his head, his thoughts circled the same phrases over and over. Who had said time healed all wounds? He wanted to kick them. Hard. In a very tender place...
He was so tired of this. He didn't want to be throwing tantrums. He just wanted to have never met Penny; never given himself the hope that he might have had a chance.
"There are sixteen year old girls that have a more balanced view of relationships..." Howard grumbled, moving the armchair back to its customary position.
"For someone with an eminent psychiatrist and neuroscientist as a mother he has a surprisingly weak grasp of the complexities of human interaction."
Howard and Raj turned to stare at Sheldon. Raj leaned into Howard. "You know it's really bad when he-" Raj jerked a thumb at Sheldon. "-can say that."
Sheldon protested, "I know the theory behind social attachments. I just don't attach any deeper meaning to the common chemical reactions meant to promote propagation of the species..."
Howard picked up Leonard's abandoned controller and tossed the secondary one to Raj. He held up a third one and waved it at Sheldon's back. "You going to play?"
Sheldon was busy marking out a wavering blue line, punctuated by green and red asterisks that fell in close succession. He wanted to at least show a linear regression, maybe superimpose a series of tangents over a sine curve... The math behind this pattern was astonishingly predictable. Too blasé to be elegant, if you thought about it. Still, maybe Leonard would see this and accept it and then they could get back to their usual routine... he remained lost in thought as the markers scratched across the board.
Howard sighed in exasperation and turned back to the TV, dropping Sheldon's controller onto the coffee table. At least he and Raj... "Well now where are you going?" He glared at Raj's back as the astrophysicist shuffled down the hallway. "Don't encourage his sulk!" he shouted, pretty sure that it would fall on selectively-deaf ears.
Howard sat down and shook his hair back into place. Fine then. Single player mode it was.
There was a soft knock at Leonard's door.
"Go away." Leonard griped, voice muffled by the pillow he was pressing his face into.
The door opened instead.
Irritation started to replace the emptiness inside pulled his other pillow over his head. He felt someone sit down on the bed. Well. At least that confirmed it wasn't Sheldon.
"Did you ever think she might be scared?" Raj's accent softened the words, took the threat out of them.
"Of what?" Leonard's disbelief heavily coated his voice.
"Think about it. She's only twenty-two," Raj's voice danced over the words.
Leonard let that sink in. He still felt like he wasn't getting something. "She's been in way more relationships than me. She lived with Kurt for years!"
"Yes, but she got hurt."
Leonard lifted his head up so that he could stare at Raj, sceptically. Raj sat, hands folded in his lap. His dark gaze was directed downwards and he didn't look up when Leonard moved. "She gets frightened, she runs away from her feelings and puts up a physical barrier – Zack, or Doug, or maybe even me..." Raj turned to flash a bright, teasing smile at Leonard, apparently trying to lighten the mood.
Leonard dropped his head back down onto the pillow with an annoyed groan.
"Oh, are you so perfect?" Leonard could practically hear Raj's eyebrows raise with the question. He refused to look up again. "Dr. Create-an-argument-to-push-girls-away?" Raj's voice needled at him again.
"I'm over her," Leonard felt compelled to remind his friend. "It doesn't matter anyways." He curled up, trying to get rid of the heavy feeling in his stomach. Anger, he thought. Or was it guilt? No, it had to be anger. She used him, and led him on. Yeah, there was anger, along with a good dose of soul-shattering despair for the future. "Go away," he added again, but with less force than he had earlier.
Raj's weight shifted off the bed. Leonard felt relieved. He didn't want to face these emotions anymore. He just wanted them to be gone already.
His bedroom door opened. "If you're so over her; man up and act like it already." Raj had raised his voice. The tender, sympathetic reasoning was gone. The door shut with a firm click.
Raj was right about something, Leonard decided. This strategy really, really wasn't working.
There'd been no distressed Penny protesting his decision. The most he'd done was upset Sheldon – and Sheldon was making his life miserable in return.
He looked over at the window and wondered how the hell he was supposed to fix this.