A/N: Hello again, everyone! I really hope you all enjoyed the last chapter. I know I did! The anonymous trolls are still striking, but I'm sticking to my policy of not allowing them a public forum to vent their insecurity-rooted hate. The last one even resorted to just repeating over and over that Sheldon kissed Amy…as if an episode from season 7 has any bearing on a story set in season 5. When the trolls are reduced to that kind of nonsense, things must be going right.
Anyway, as always, I don't claim ownership of the show or characters. Anything resembling real people, places, or events is entirely coincidental.
As with the rest of the story, I'm flying without a beta here.
I wasn't going to post this one so soon, but the amazing reviews I got gave me the inspiration I needed to finish it off. For my friend FairDrea, I hope this puts a smile in your day! :)
Real life is going to intrude in a big way over the next couple weeks, so I don't know when Chapter 11 will be up, but rest assured the story does not end here, and I will finish it.
This is the money chapter. From very early on in my draft, these are the events that I knew I wanted to get to eventually. I could be wrong, but I don't think what I'm attempting here has ever been done in the fandom before. It's a common trope – and one backed up in canon – to have Penny talk about going Junior Rodeo or declaring that it's 'Junior Rodeo on' (Panty Piñata anyone?), but to my knowledge, no one has ever written her actually going Junior Rodeo on someone.
Well my friends, the wait is over. I present Penny literally going Junior Rodeo.
Warmth.
As Leonard swam through the haze of unconsciousness the very first sensation his brain was able to discern was warmth. A warm, pulsing body pressed heavily against his. Penny? Wow, what the hell did we do last night? And how many times did we do it? I'm a stud, his drug-impaired brain thought.
Waking up this disoriented but lying next to Penny meant the night before had probably been epic. He tried to reach out to scoot closer to her – she was always averse to cuddling after sex, and especially in the morning, but his hazy memory of the night before still distinctly recalled her decision to leave acting behind and become his housewife – taking advantage of the situation, but something impeded his progress. His fingers refused to obey his mind's commands. On further investigation, Leonard discovered something was covering them. Fabric of some kind seemed to be encasing his entire body except his face.
Before he could force his eyes open and figure out what the hell was going on, a warm, wet tongue slathered one entire side of his face. His still-foggy mind registered both surprise at Penny's forwardness and no small amount of pride that he'd managed to satisfy her so thoroughly the night before that she wanted more the morning after, something she usually avoided. King of Foreplay, indeed, he thought.
The body next to him grunted. That's odd. Normally her morning grunts aren't that deep. Finally able to open his eyes, they quickly went as wide as they could possibly go when he saw large, dark eyes, round ears that swiveled back and forth, and a circular, wet nose in front of his face. When Leonard finally registered that the body he attempted to spoon, which then turned and licked his face before grunting in disgust, was a cow, the shriek he let out started the creature so badly it rumbled again and quickly trotted away from him.
Looking around, Leonard saw that he was lying on loose dirt in a corrugated metal pen. Three sides were enclosed in metal pipe fencing. Directly behind him was a gate of some kind, but it appeared to be securely fastened. Confusion filled him. The last thing he remembered from the night before was having a beer with Penny, celebrating her decision to abandon her career and take care of his house and (future) children. Now he had awakened in a small pen with a cow. Looking down at himself, he saw that rather than the usual purple hoodie he wore almost everywhere, someone had taken the time to dress him in a full-length pig costume. The cloth he felt on his hands was designed to appear as hooves, by the entire thing was essentially an overgrown children's onesie, complete with a zipper up the middle.
"What the fu…" He never finished the thought.
A loud bell, much like at a school, sounded and the gate behind him swung open. He saw the cow start to run at him and in his fear he turned to run the only direction he could escape. Out the open door he ran into an oval-shaped arena. The stands were darkened except for a few figures too dimly illuminated for his hazy mind to identify.
Turning back, Leonard saw the bovine running straight out of the pen behind him, so he did the only thing his panicked mind told him would result in getting away: he veered off to one side. Too late, he saw that he picked the wrong side. Thunder rumbled in the distance behind him. As he turned to see what fresh hell was approaching, his mind irrelevantly informed him that the shock on his face meant that he looked like any generic movie character who sees their doom and comically expresses their fear.
It wasn't that he'd never seen horses before. As a child, he'd gone to a few birthday parties at petting zoos when his mother could be bothered to allow him to indulge in 'silly, superficial expressions of cultural celebration'. He knew horses were large animals, big enough to carry a human around, even, but he'd only seen them from the slightly elevated position of grandstands and bleachers. He'd always been too scared to approach them and see the animals at ground level.
The sight before him was terrifying enough to drive the last remnants of whatever drugs he'd ingested from his system. Despite his sudden sobriety, the black horse bearing down on him looked like it was snorting fire, like one of the mythological horses of Diomedes, the blonde rider on top looking for all the world like a Valkyrie, charging for his very soul. Her terrible war cry struck fear to his very marrow, so terrible and awful it was to hear.
Leonard turned to run, but in his haste and unfamiliarity with his costume, he tripped over the fabric hooves and fell to the dirt. The pounding of the horse's hooves were getting ever closer, so he put all his energy into escaping as fast as possible. Getting back to his feet would have taken too much time, so he started running away on all fours. With the horse directly behind him, he turned and ran to one side again, feeling a rush of satisfaction when the hoof beats went on past before stopping as the rider turned around. Still not taking the time to get to his feet, he kept running for what looked like an open part of the arena wall. Freedom lay beyond. The Valkyrie was riding harder than ever straight for him, and he put everything he had into his escape.
It didn't last very long. Within seconds, a rope materialized around his midsection and tightened, arresting his movement and dropping him to the dirt. When he struggled and fought to get to his feet, a disturbingly familiar lavender scent assaulted his nostrils as a weight landed on him, pushing his face to one side into the dirt and obscuring his vision. His mystery assaulter looped the rest of the rope around his legs and hands, effectively trussing him up like a turkey before getting off of him.
"Time?" A similarly familiar female voice shouted.
From somewhere above him, another voice came over a public address system. "6.5 seconds. Congratulations!"
Leonard shook his head free of the dirt and put the voice, the scent, and the gorgeous, jeans-encased derriere in front of him together and realized that Penny was the mysterious rider who had just hog-tied him. He tried to gulp down air to get his breath back, but the exertion left him only able to wheeze. "Wheee! Wheee! Wheee!" he breathed, trying to catch his wind.
"Aww," came a voice from behind him, "He even squeals like a pig!"
"Usually you're faster than that, at least on the film I was able to find of your Junior Rodeo days ," Leonard heard an unfamiliar voice challenge.
"I always was on the calves," Penny answered, "They always run straight. It's the damned pigs you have to watch out for. They'll swerve when you least expect it."
Applause rained down from all sides. Leonard rolled onto his back and looked around. All of his friends were around him in the first row of the bleachers. To his horror, Bernadette was doubled over with laughter, Raj had silent tears rolling down his face, and Howard could barely stand straight, they were laughing so hard. In front of Howard was a giant television camera on a tripod with cords going off somewhere behind the grandstands. A group of unfamiliar people sat on the other side of the arena with a microphone in front of one of them.
Penny turned around to face him with a triumphant smirk on her face. In addition to the jeans, she wore a denim long-sleeved shirt, complete with white trim on the seams and pockets. A black cowboy hat sat slightly askew on her head, knocked that way in the chase, most likely. She even had on black leather boots, complete with spurs. She had never looked more terrible or beautiful.
"What the fuck did you do to me?" he shouted, struggling futilely against the rope.
"Just a juvenile prank," she drawled, her grin widening, "No big deal, right?"
Those words which he had once uttered when he had similarly humiliated a colleague he used to call his best friend, started a cold ball of dread forming in his gut. Before he could respond, everyone in the darkened stands hopped down and started walking across the dirt toward his position. "Nice job, Penny!" Bernadette enthused, "But wouldn't it have been more authentic to put him in a cow costume?"
"Yeah, probably, but when I went to my usual place, they said they didn't make cow or even calf costumes in a size small enough to fit him, so I had to go with a pig. It ended up working out pretty appropriately, didn't it?" She laughed.
"Could not agree more, m'lady," Howard answered with an overdone, but still charming bow. Penny had to give it to him; ever since Bernadette, he was a changed man. The leers were still there occasionally, as were the crude remarks, but he really had worked to change his behavior since his engagement.
"You're fucking crazy! You could have killed me!" It was useless to fight the knots, Leonard discovered as he snarled at Penny. It was humiliating having to lie in the dirt at everyone's feet, but until someone freed him, he was there at their mercies.
"Please. I never even killed a cow when I was doing Junior Rodeo in Nebraska," she retorted with derisive snort. "You were never in any danger. Now, we have a few things to discuss."
"I'm not discussing anything with you until you untie me, you psychotic bitch!" he tried to show some bravado to bully her into releasing him. He only succeeded in rolling onto one side.
In a blonde flash, Penny was kneeling next to him, but instead of freeing him, there was a metallic flash and suddenly a wicked-looking blade was pressed to his groin. "If this was a real rodeo, you'd be a gelding already. I don't appreciate the curses and insults from a deranged stalker. If you want to keep your ability to add to the Hofstadter genetic line, I'd suggest putting an end to the insults. Got me?" Seeing his acquiescence manifested in how his struggling stopped, she continued. "Here's the deal: I should turn you in to the police for stalking and harassment. I should. Hell, I even found your cameras," as Leonard started shaking his head she interrupted him, "Howard here was kind enough to trace the signals to your laptop, so don't bother denying it. Anyway, as I was saying before I was interrupted, between this latest incident, your screwing with Sheldon's experiment, and the whole Joyce Kim episode, there's more than enough that the circle of us could put together to get you in a butt-load of trouble, do you understand me?"
Eyes wide with fear and too petrified to move, Leonard just nodded as softly as possible.
"Good. Now, you have two choices: you can either stay here on your own and find a new apartment, since I don't think Sheldon wants you in his anymore and no one here wants to see your face ever again, trying to brazen out the storm of your behavior, knowing all the while that one wrong look, one accidental step, will result in not only CalTech's administration but also law enforcement receiving data on everything I mentioned; or you can go to the university first thing in the morning, confess everything from the Arctic expedition and resign your position, moving back to New Jersey immediately afterward. You will never contact any of us ever again."
As Leonard looked at the hardness in her expression, he dredged up whatever dignity remained in a man dressed in a pig costume and hog-tied in front of his closest friends and a group of strangers. "You're fucking bluffing. I'm going to destroy all of you, starting with the tape in that camera over there."
"Ah, no can do, mi amigo," Howard chimed in, sarcasm dripping off the last word, "See, that blue cord off the back of the camera is a high-speed gigabit Ethernet cable. The video of what just happened posted to YouTube almost in real-time after bouncing around the world through a secure network, emerging somewhere in New York City. Good luck trying to find which computer among twelve million IP addresses posted it. Oh and all the corroborating information on the video indicates that this was a Jackass-style stunt."
"I'll get out of here and hack into YouTube to take it down. You're not that good," he shot back, but his braggadocio was waning by the minute.
"Here's the problem with that little bit of hubris: not only is Howard better with computers than you, that guy over there," Penny indicated one of the strangers, "is better than Howard could ever dream of being. Sorry Howard," she apologized.
"No worries, Penny. He's a wizard. I know my limits," the engineer answered with a grin.
"That information I said we have on you?" Penny went on, turning back to the supine Leonard, "It's securely stored in a special email account with very careful precautions taken. If you take any action against Sheldon, Bernadette, Howard, Raj, or anyone involved in this, it gets released. Any attempts to find and hack it trigger the sending command. And if you even think about kidnapping me for your perverted fantasies about a barefoot and pregnant housewife, here's the final kicker: I have to send a special code every twenty-four hours to the account, otherwise the information gets sent to the university and the police. It's over, Hofstadter."
He tried to snarl again. "You'll be back. You always come crawling back with your tail between your legs. At least until you can get me between them. When you fail out at acting again, I'll be right here, and you'll have to admit that you're nothing without me."
She snorted again and made to leave, ignoring his hateful vitriol, but he had one last barb left. "He'll never love you. Not the way you need it. He's an asexual freak, and you're a whore. You could never be happy with him."
So intense was her anger at the insults to herself and Sheldon that when Penny turned back, everyone present could see mayhem in her gaze. Whipping her knife out again, she started advancing on Leonard, expression growing more malevolent with each step. Howard and Raj tried to physically restrain her from following through on her castration threat, but neither were any match for her strength, especially in her rage. Two of the newcomers had to pitch in to keep Penny from violence..
Bernadette stood in front of the group and forced Penny to meet her eyes, willing her to calm down and lose the killing rage. "He's not worth it, Penny!" She said calmly, standing still in the face of almost unbridled rage. "You've already ruined his career. Don't sink to his level.
Penny shrugged off her friends with a small smile of apology. The group stood around him in a ring, looking down with righteous condemnation. "If you ever, and I mean EVER, stalk, harass, or otherwise try to insert yourself into the life of any woman without her permission again, we'll know it," she growled, "We'll be watching you, Leonard. Make the right choice. Do the right thing for once in your miserable life. We're through."
Without another word, everyone turned and walked out of the arena, deaf to his pleas for someone to cut him loose. He was alone, tied up, and dressed like a pig.
"Damn it!" he shouted, impotently struggling against the ropes.
What Penny failed to mention was that there was a caption uploaded with the video, only appearing in the final five seconds. On the screen in front of Sheldon's stunned face appeared a simple message:
Now we're even, MoonPie.
With a satisfied huff, Sheldon closed his laptop and sighed deeply. Just as he got up to make some tea, there was a knock at his door. He looked at his watch and smiled. Right on time, as always.
Opening the door, he greeted his visitor. "Hello, Amy. I'm so glad you could make it. Please do come in. We need to talk."
A/N: Was that a little over the top? Sure, but it was a hell of a lot of fun to write, especially in the face of all the trolls who have flamed this story and me personally since it got started.
Not much of Sheldon here again, and I do apologize for that. I had to take care of Leonard first, and for the purposes of this story, it was crucial to have Penny be the one that disposed of that hobbit-sized troll.
There really are rodeo locations in the greater Los Angeles area, so there is a way for this to happen. I know the writers have had canon Penny keep that part of her life firmly in her past, but I couldn't resist.
Trust me, Sheldon and Penny are far from done. Sometimes you need a kick in the pants to get moving, right?
Constructive feedback is always welcome. Don't let the trolls win!