Okay, new update! This I've had written for a while; soon we'll get to see how she adjusts and him too, as well as how her leaving affects the rest of the guys, but we're still getting through the initial separation right now. Hopefully this chapter successfully establishes how Penny's starting to get around the town.

DISCLAIMER: I own nothing that you recognize.

By the end of Penny's first day at work, she was exhausted. Ten to six shifts were nothing like the four hour ones she'd been used to at the restaurant, and trying to keep up with such energetic people drained her of all the excess energy. Shelly and Brandy had asked her if she wanted to go to the local diner with them, but she'd politely excused herself, feigning a headache and telling the truth about the exhaustion. She was glad that home was downhill the last half-mile.

Upon her return home, Penny was happy to discover some more of her old belongings waiting in boxes at the door. She was especially thrilled to see her laptop-even though the memory had been completely wiped; it wasn't long before she'd logged on to the internet and accessed Leonard's Twitter account.

Chinese food with DrCooper Wolowizard RRKoothraparty Bernadette86 as per usual.

I have a great new picture for my dresser…don't know that I'll ever love a picture more.

Penny closed out of the page after noticing that the third most recent tweet had been made the week before, when she was still with him. She wiped her eyes, letting out a deep sigh and closing the laptop. She knew that he wouldn't update his university page until the following day, but she wondered if she should even look at it. Was it a simple way of ensuring that all of her friends were still okay, or would she be torturing herself to look at it?

Maybe it was just better to forget and move on. Penny decided that it was.

Less than a minute later, she was back online, checking to see if the 'available for rent' ad was still up for apartment 4B on her old building's website. Seeing that it was, she breathed a sigh of relief. A shell of her still existed in Pasadena. A shell of the real Penny.

Penny typed in the university's website and found Leonard's blog. Most of what he'd entered for that day was completely general, but Penny ate it up. They were words written by the man she loved, the man she'd left behind to pursue safety, and she was grateful for even the most common sentences. It made her regret never reading the blog before. Then, at the end, one lone sentence stood out, a paragraph by itself, just below a section on the potential of the new grad students.

On another note, I am very glad that Mr. Wolowitz's girl friend, a student at another university, has joined my group of friends. We have more in common than I thought, as I discovered today.

Leonard had known Bernadette for a year. There was little he didn't know about he already, and his words could only mean one thing.

They knew that the other knew that Penny was in the Witness Protection Problem. And even though Penny knew that they'd find out from each other eventually, getting conformation like that, from way too many miles away oh – so discreetly, made Penny smile; she was learning things about her old home and her old friends.

Penny shut the laptop and turned it off, heading up the ladder to bed. She pulled on her Hello Kitty shorts and crawled into the hammock, but tonight she couldn't just fall asleep. She wasn't cold, not really, and the hammock was actually very comfortable. But she was alone. And the one that was usually with her would never lay at her side again.

Penny crawled out of the hammock and found the quilt from her old bed and Leonard's pillow. Holding the items in her arms, she lay back down and pulled the quilt around her. She put the pillow behind her head, and then changed her mind, holding it against her chest and burying her fact in it.

It was the closest she'd ever get.

Within the next two weeks, Penny got a bed moved up into the loft, and she got her computer permanently set up in the living room, where she figured she'd spend most of her time when she wasn't working. And she was working a lot. She got one day off a week, and it wasn't the day that either Brandy, Shelly, or Caroline, a blonde so dumb it bordered stereotypical, weren't working. On her first day off, she'd holed up in her house, re – reading Eat, Pray, Love and watching all that she could fit in of the six seasons of Sex and the City – at least until the Witness Protection agent showed up for their weekly check in. Then she had to stop-right in the middle of her favorite episode, too. Damn program.

Her second day off, eight days later, she'd decided to explore the town and had come home balancing a bag of fish on her bike handlebars. She put them in a large glass bowl she'd found in one of the cupboards and then remembered that she'd forgotten to buy food. That had sent her back into town, where she'd met Victor, a man in his thirties who worked at the pet store. At first, she'd thought he was hitting on her, and had been so disinterested that she'd feared that she was rude in her attempts to discourage him. Then, in conversation, he'd mentioned that he'd just gotten engaged. Penny took her fish food and went home, glad that she didn't have to deal with anyone expressing interest in her. She could cut herself off from her old life completely, but there was no off switch on her heart, and it still belonged to Leonard. She just didn't know what kind of excuse she'd throw to anyone who would end up hitting on her. "I have a boyfriend" wouldn't do.

After feeding her fish, Penny took the bike back into town and got the general lay of the land. It was fairly straightforward, Lonusedi, like the mall, was basically one street, with houses all around on mini side streets that weren't much more than driveways shared by two or three homes. Most of them were small like Penny's; a few were larger and one held at least eight children.

After the first day on the town, Penny felt better about her new placement. She could get around, she had a few friends, and she had a few fish that would be companions of sorts. She was going three or more days without checking Leonard's university page, which she'd come to call Refuge, and she felt that she was adjusting well.

It was two months into living in her new environment that she went to Refuge and discovered that there hadn't been any updates in nearly a week. Penny quickly checked the pages of Sheldon, Raj, and Howard, and they hadn't been updated in even longer than Leonard's had. It was then that she noticed a blinking sentence in the corner of her screen.

This site has been frozen while maintenance is performed. We should be back up and running in (the number three was flashing) days.

Penny let out a sigh of relief; a small part of her paranoid, lonely self had been worrying that something was wrong. Knowing it was a website problem was comforting, yet knowing that Leonard couldn't indirectly communicate with her, even if he wanted to, made her feel even more desperate to hear his voice. She pulled out her new cell phone and was halfway through dialing his number when sense overcame her and she snapped the phone shut. She knew that should she contact him, the Department of Justice would not protect her any longer.

She reached for the glass square that she had sitting by the computer, tilting it to see the snowflake in the dim light. "Is this killing you too, Leonard?"

He didn't have to answer. She knew in her heart that he hadn't moved on yet, either.

The first time she was paid, she took the check to the bank, attempting to live up to her promise to herself. Upon arriving in Lonusedi she vowed to be smart about her finances; she didn't have anyone that she knew would help her if she got in a bad situation, and she couldn't afford to get into legal trouble. She'd promised herself that she'd put every cent in the bank, and only withdraw when she had to.

Standing in the line, holding her check in both hands and studying it so she wouldn't have to talk to any of the older people in line, she smiled at the amount and prided herself for being so responsible.

Upon reaching the counter, she made a snap decision; a decision that she hadn't known she was going to make until the words came out of her mouth.

The man at the counter did as he was told.

Penny walked home with one hundred dollars in cash, which she stashed in the bedroom. Then she sank on to her bed and asked herself why she took out money that she didn't need.

She had no answer. But she didn't take it back to the bank.