Apocalypse Week

Chapter 9: Physics Kills (more than Penny's patience)

She didn't want to get up. She was warm, cozy, and distinctly comfortable with the uneasy sensation of anxiety fluttering beneath her breastbone as her fingers remained twined with Sheldon's. She knew the spell would eventually need to break and she would have to move, but she savoured every precious second, because it was precious and she knew that the moment she admitted to being awake, it would be gone forever, and knowing Sheldon as she did, there would never be another chance. Maybe next Apocalypse Week his defences would be down enough, but certainly not for the other 51 weeks of the year.

Penny thought the morning after she slept with Sheldon was going to be awkward. She thought she'd have to sheepishly tiptoe past three bemused/horrified/shocked boys to get to her apartment to shower. There was a distinct possibility that they were all still spread out over Leonard's mattress, Leonard doing his great jellyfish impressions, Raj huddled in fetal position, and Howard leering at her, since as hard as she tried, she couldn't picture him sleeping through her trying to sneak by while doing the walk of shame out of Sheldon's room.

Not that there was much shame involved, considering the warm feeling spreading out from within her tummy - one she was labelling fondness and leaving it at that. Sheldon was still sleeping as she eased herself out of his bed – or, truth be told, he was watching her through eyes opened just a slit – but if he was going to pretend, then she'd honour that and pretend too. Penny figured that if he had a real problem, he would have told her by now, so it probably just hadn't occurred to him that this was potentially awkward. He probably just wanted her to leave so he could get another thirty minutes of uninterrupted sleep. It was likely he wasn't feigning sleep, he just wanted to watch her without opening his eyes.

Though why he was watching was a mystery to her. Did he think she was going to accidentally knock over his paper TARDIS on her way out the door (painstakingly crafted for hours until every detail was in scale – she knew, because she was the only other crafty person he knew, everyone else smart enough to at least pretend to be all thumbs when he found the blueprints on the internet. And yeah, ok, if she hadn't quite literally bled constructing that thing, she might be tempted to accidentally knock it over and stomp on it, but he'd looked really pleased when it was completed and actually went so far as to offer a 'good job, team Sheldon'. Despite it being one of the most annoying afternoons of her life, it was kind of a fond memory)?

Penny found herself staring at the TARDIS for too long, because when she looked back to him, she wasn't sure if he was still looking at her anymore or if his eyes really were closed.

She paused before opening his door, turning back to watch him, unable to just leave. She wanted to blow him a kiss, which she'd done before to annoy him when he was Sheldon, but now that this was Sheldon, the man she'd just woken up next to in a completely nonsexual way, but one that transcended his rumoured asexuality enough that Penny was kind of sure that blowing him a kiss would mean something, she hesitated. This was their last moment of just the two of them for the day, possibly forever if she wasn't reading him properly, and she wanted to crystallize it in her mind.

She gave him a tiny wave, like a complete boob, and left. Already feeling like an idiot, she stepped into the living room, expecting to have three sets of eyes on her immediately.

There was no one there.

"Those rat bastards," Penny muttered, stepping over discarded blankets, picking her way across the unmade bed.

"Thank god," she responded to herself, in an even lower tone as she reached the door to the hallway.

Penny showered and found herself obsessively perfecting her hair, spending far longer than was strictly necessary considering the man she was primping for wouldn't notice the slight uniform bounce and curl to the locks. By the time she returned, all three of them were lined up on the couch, huddling in blankets and drinking coffee from mugs, not take-out, as though they'd been there the entire time. Penny narrowed her eyes at them.

She could use mad invisibility skills like that. Maybe she could get back into Sheldon's room without him knowing and – actually, forget that. That idea was more creepy than it was good.

"You're lucky you left. It was so cold last night I woke up to a cold nose."

"It was so cold last night I didn't wake up with morning wood," Howard joined in.

"Thank Krisna," Raj said, making the image of a cross, "since I was so cold last night I found myself curled up around you."

"Maybe that was why you were unhappy, eh buddy?" Howard asked, looking down at his penis.

"Hey! I'll have you know that a lot of men would be very happy to wake up next to me!" Raj retorted. "That sounded better in my head."

"There is no way that sounded like anything other than what it came out as," Leonard claimed. "Did you have a good sleep, Penny? Warm?"

Penny found herself jumping guiltily at the question, despite the whole lack of guile in Leonard's tone. "Sure. I had an incredibly good sleep all warm and toasty and not being groped. How about you?" she asked sweetly.

Leonard muttered something about flailers.

"My sleep was also pleasant," Sheldon said, joining them in the room, "and would have remained so if someone hadn't disturbed my circadian rhythms." He said this with reproach, but he wasn't staring at her.

The three of them had the grace to look sheepish.

"Hey! We weren't the ones who went into your room in the middle of the night!" Raj pointed out. "Why don't you stare at her all accusingly for a while?"

"Penny is already aware of my dissension," Sheldon dismissed as he left the room. "I let my feelings on the subject be known last night."

What did that even mean? Penny wondered. His feelings on the subject of her being in his room were to allow her to stay? He couldn't possibly mean that. He must have said something that made his displeasure known, she just couldn't remember anything particularly grating or disapproving coming out of his mouth.

Of course, considering the cloud she was floating on, she couldn't particularly remember any reason she might have to dislike him, either. Yet, she was aware that in that past there had been moments where she actively hated the things he did, if not the man himself.

Penny didn't want to look at that too closely. There weren't many reasons for a girl to forget or romanticize past sins, and the one that first came to mind wasn't something she really wanted to think about.

Since Leonard was already sitting in Sheldon's spot, the spot Penny considered de facto-ly hers when Sheldon's butt wasn't in it, Penny was forced to stand over him with a glare of displeasure. "That's my seat."

Leonard snickered into his coffee.

Penny realized he thought she was joking based on Sheldon's usual rant on his 0,0,0,0 Cartesian whatever. "No, seriously. My seat."

"Seriously?" Leonard asked with a slight choking sound on the coffee he was practically inhaling through his nose.

"I've been sitting there all week," Penny pointed out with narrowed eyes.

"She has," Raj agreed. "And Sheldon has not said a word. Do you really want to poke the dragon?"

"I can't see how it would make a difference who sits here," Leonard pointed out in what was actually a rather rational manner, but since he was chair blocking her, she wasn't in the mood for his rationality. "Why is it so important to you?"

Because it's Sheldon'swas on the tip of her tongue, but she managed to pull the words back at the last moment. Stop being so greedy, she told herself. She couldn't have everything all at once. She should be happy that she had woken up in Sheldon's bed, what with her little crush, but she was starting to realize that she didn't want just the little things (or big things, what with his rules about his room), she wanted it all, and she wanted it now.

"Leonard, seat," Sheldon said as he strode into the room and turned on the projector, barely even sparing them a glance. Penny was already seated in the armchair, so Leonard ended up sliding off the couch to perch on the floor.

Ha! Take that, Penny mentally crowed. It was his fault for not moving. Sheldon never would have unroosted her from that position.

Once that thought rang both true and false through her mind – true, because he hadn't, not a single day that week, complained about her sitting in his spot, but false, because this was Sheldon Lee Cooper, and where some men got proprietary about their cars or their women, he got overly protective of the good old quadruple-zero of his cushion – Penny felt jarred by the surprise that his behaviour might not have the same consistency as his spot did.

The thing of it was, Penny realized, that it wasn't strange for Sheldon to lay claim to his seat, even when he wasn't sitting in it. Everyone knew that. She hadn't seen it, the subtleties too small, but him allowing her to sleep with him last night wasn't the first time he had broken his rules for her, even during this week where all the rules were thrown out the window, when he wouldn't have done the same for any of the others. He hadn't once even given her a wayward glance when she was in his spot and she had attributed it to leniency since he was in front of the room and there were four possible places to sit and four people. Now she knew it wasn't due to the fact he was in lecture mode.

Everything she had been denying, protecting herself from, rose to the surface in a rush that stuck in her throat, a lump that felt impossible to swallow back down.

This whole time, while they were looking for proof of zombie/alien/yeti life, she'd been looking to Sheldon and missing the signs that were right in front of her face. She wasn't alone. Things really were different between them.

She wasn't alone in this.

Was she?

x.x.x.x.x.

They were over the hump, there being less days left in the week than there were past. It was also the most boring day in existence. "I think this one is Sheldon's favourite," Howard whispered to her. "On days where his grasp on humanity is tenuous, I worry about all the knowledge he has at his fingertips."

Penny was calling it the "Sheldon lectures on all the ways scientists could kill us all snoozefest." It wasn't that she wasn't interested in knowing the Hadron Collider existed (she already knew), or that one wrong button push could wipe out this universe and probably all the universes in existence. It was just that she couldn't do anything about it.

The really frightening thing was she was sitting with a group of men who could.

It was one thing to know that your friends/neighbours were really smart genius types. It was another thing to know that when Sheldon lectured on what to avoid doing so as not to implode the world, they weren't talking about strategy in some game of what-if. That shit was real. They had the responsibility to not make humanity unexist.

It also made her realize that all those movies where the government called on super geniuses to save the world? Yeah, who ya gonna call?

She knew who she would, and he was standing in front of her with a smudge of whiteboard marker across one of his cheekbones.

What she didn't think was that today was Sheldon's favourite. She thought today was the day Sheldon felt obligated to include because of how close to home the topic was. It was like those particularly gory videos she had to watch during Driver's Ed as a teen – there for necessity to scare teens into being careful, not because gratuitous blood was cool. So she listened and didn't really learn anything but another reason to fear for her life. Heck if she wanted any of these boys to get behind the Hadron Collider one day and cause all the strings in the universe (and all dimensions) to collapse.

That didn't mean she wasn't bored. At least in Driver's Ed the videos had been as entertaining as they were horrifying. The only thing entertaining Penny was winking at Sheldon every time he looked at her and seeing how long it would take before he asked if there was something wrong with her eye.

He didn't seem to notice, too concerned with rambling on about the ionisation potential of the Hydrogen atom or whatever.

"CERN developed the world wide web for coordinating an inter-school physics experiment," Leonard piped up.

Sheldon had his 'you're being an idiot' look, and then Sheldon had the look he gave Leonard. "Yes? Your point?"

"Not all by-products of physics experiments result in the universe imploding."

"No, some just result in thousands of layoffs and people becoming obsolete," Howard joked.

For some reason, Sheldon seemed incredibly pleased with this conversation, his entire face perking up a bit, even as he gave Leonard a stern look. "You don't comprehend the inherent hazard of physics?" Sheldon asked sharply.

"I understand, Sheldon, I'm a physicist!" Leonard argued.

"I believe a demonstration is in order," Sheldon responded shortly, striding out of the living room.

"I understand physics, Sheldon!" Leonard called again. "It's dangerous, I get it! Sheldon!"

Poor Leonard, Penny noted with amusement. He didn't seem to get that Sheldon was pretty much following a script and would have said the same line to anyone, if they had been the one to challenge him. Penny wasn't sure if any of them got it, it might be uniquely one of her talents, being able to spot a script from a mile away. Maybe watching The Hills (and, ok, Jersey Shore) was good for something!

The three of them sat there for a few moments, all watching the door with various levels of anticipation.

Sheldon popped his head back in, just his head, and Howard visibly jumped.

"Well," Sheldon snapped. "We don't have all day!"

The four of them rose from their seats with various levels of trepidation. Howard was practically hauling ass, limping slightly with what looked like a possible knee injury or maybe even a pulled back muscle. That was when she noticed that all of them were looking particularly haggard. She really, really didn't want to know why the three of them looked like they had gone through a war and lost. Did they crawl out of the cold and immediately go to a strip club or something?

"Gentlemen, lady, physics is not a subject one can be negligent about," Sheldon informed them once he reached the fifth floor in a tone that told her this was another prepared speech.

"What's your excuse for watching Jersey Shore?" she asked Raj, sidling up beside him.

"Are you thinking of how Sheldon just fed us a noticeably prepared line?" he asked back, all hushed whisper as they climbed the stairs to the roof.

"Yeah, why else would I be thinking about Jersey Shore? I'm pretty sure there's no physics involved, unless you count Snooki's hair."

Raj offered her his fist and she pressed her knuckles against his. Before she could move back to continue up the stairs, he stopped her. "I know you slept with Sheldon last night," Raj whispered to her.

"No! I didn't actually! I mean there was no..." Penny blathered. "It was just sleeping," she finally confessed.

"Please," Raj dismissed, giving her a knowing look. "You wouldn't have been so quiet if there was sex involved."

Penny shot Raj a smug look. "No, I think I would have been very vocal."

"I was talking about him," Raj responded pointedly, and they both looked across up the stairs at Sheldon, who had paused to talk about string theory mid-way up the last flight to the roof.

"Yeah? You think?" Penny asked, definitely pleased and almost in delight.

"Definitely."

She was half way through smiling, when she realized this meant the secret she wanted to guard jealously, so that the only two people who knew were the ones who were there – not out of shame, obviously, but out of a sense of it being theirs – was common knowledge. Raj had been sleeping at the time. "So everyone else knows?"

He snorted. "I doubt it. They may see, but they never notice."

That was pretty profound for someone who knew what gym, tan, laundry was.

x.x.x.x.

Before long, they reached the roof, where Sheldon adopted a similar lecturing pose with the rest of them crowded in front of him.

"You don't believe physics can be dangerous?" Sheldon asked shortly, standing near the edge of the roof. "You disbelieve the inherent hazards in something you can't see?"

"I never said that!" Leonard denied hotly, looking extremely put out that Sheldon wasn't listening to him.

Raj snickered.

"Consider momentum," Sheldon said, picking up a chunk of broken concrete that had dropped off the ledge. Penny eyed his hand carefully as he gave it a slight toss in the air. "And the effects of gravity. I challenge any one of you to pick up this rock and throw it into traffic without—"

"This rock?" Penny asked, grabbing it mid-air and judging the weight herself. She wasn't entirely stupid, she knew what the effects of a chunk of stone that size would be when thrown off a roof, but Sheldon was getting a little complacent with his pre-rehearsed speeches, and Penny considered it her job, nay, her duty to keep him on his toes.

She didn't intend to actually throw the stupid thing, but she'd been bored during his ramblings about CERN and HADRON and ADRIAN and STELLA, and liberally applied apple-blossom scented hand cream until he gave her a sniff of disapproval (or allergies, whatever). So her hands were kind of slippery, and for a rock, the chunk of concrete was surprisingly smooth, so where she had planned to fake them all out by pretending to throw the thing over the side of the building, she accidentally threw it over the side of the building.

The moment it left her hand, Penny's self preservation kicked in and she went down out of sight, grabbing Sheldon by the arm and dragging him down behind the ledge beside her. He let out an undignified squawk as his long limbs folded beneath him and he more or less collapsed on his ass.

The other three boy, all frozen with various looks of shock and dismay and confusion on their faces, hesitated before crouching down as well.

"I didn't mean to do that," Penny whispered in a distressed tone.

"No, really?" Wolowitz asked in a sarcastic tone. "Because we all thought you deliberately threw a 2 pound rock off the side of a building, endangering the lives of pedestrians and drivers alike."

"0.916 pounds. Approximately," Sheldon corrected. "Given the height of the building and the gravitational force, it would fall at a velocity of—"

"We can all do the math," Leonard pointed out, less sarcastically than Howard, actually braving the situation to peek over the side of the ledge to assess damage. "It looks like it only hit a parked car, guys."

"Only?" Penny questioned, ignoring the fact that she couldn't do the math.

"Did you not hear the part about pedestrians?" Sheldon wondered. "A direct hit could have resulted in loss of life and most certainly extreme damage to the cranium. Likewise..."

"Oh," Leonard said in the background. "OH! OH NO!"

"...the effects in traffic could have been catastrophic. The windshield is not created to withstand..."

"I know Sheldon!" Leonard shrieked, almost pulling out his hair. "My car!" he rounded on Penny. "You hit my car! The hood is entirely dented in."

"It looks like it was struck by Thor's hammer," Raj joined in.

"Or the Hulk hulked out on it," Howard agreed.

"Or Iron Man dropped his helmet on it."

"Or Captain America thought it was a Nazi?" Raj questioned.

"Or the Fantastic Four..."

"Shut up," Leonard said harshly, giving the two of them an incredibly pointed glare. "I can't believe first someone smashed in my back window, and now you threw a rock off the top of a five story building and it landed on my car. My insurance will never believe this."

"I informed you of the inherent danger of physics," Sheldon said, almost smugly. "You have all learned a valuable lesson today."

"I learned this lesson when I was five and fell off the kitchen table and my tooth went through my lip. Blood was everywhere," Howard recollected less than fondly.

"In the Indian ghetto where I..."

"Eugh!" Leonard exclaimed, pacing back across the roof, his hands still in his hair, causing it to spike up in tuffs. "This is Sheldon's fault, somehow, I just know it. Did you hear that Sheldon? Your fault! You just had to take me out of work this week so that my..."

"You know what else we learned," Penny said to Sheldon in a hushed voice, both of them still crouched together in front of the ledge where she had dragged him. There was a smudge of dirt on his pants, and some of his fingers were still tangled in hers from where she had pulled him down and held him down. "Another effective zombie fighting method."

"...you may as well have put your fist through the window yourself, with the force of all your crazy convictions of the inevitability of apocalyptic events behind it..."

He looked vaguely surprised, but then he could still be holding on to the same expression he had when she threw the stupid rock over in the first place, she hadn't quite focused on his face in the interim. "While it is commendable that you are applying new knowledge to previously learned skills, I find it worrisome that you have such a blatant disregard for the fundamental laws."

"I know I messed up, Sheldon, but do you really think Leonard is going to send me to jail?"

"...you should be locked up for this, in a loony bin. Your mom may have had you tested, but I won't believe it until my mom has you tested."

"I was referring to the law of universal gravitation as superceded by the theory of general relativity."

x.x.x.x.x.

A/N: My thanks to Seyfert for helping me with this chapter. Anything redeemable in it was probably her idea. Jersey Shore, on the other hand, was all me. Happy Holidays to those of you celebrating this year. It's my first Christmas away from home, so I'll appreciate any love you can spare me.