Disclaimer: Still don't own the things.
It always surprised people that Penelope had elected to stay in the same apartment that she had been shot outside of. She didn't pretend it hadn't been weird at first, walking past the same spot where her blood marked the floor every single day. The thing was, Battle would have loved it if she had died. And he would have loved it even more if, as she hadn't died, her personality had died, if her work helping people had died, and if she had let herself get bullied out of the apartment that was rightfully hers. She paid the rent, not him.
She liked to think that if Battle was looking up at her from hell, or watching her as a ghost, then he would be completely dissatisfied—she had been about to change apartments before the shooting, now she was even more dedicated to living there. Sometimes she thought about toning her style down; now she was sure that she was meant to rock her look, and amped it up as much as she could. She tired herself out working for the BAU, running the survivor's groups, helping other divisions on the sly. She ran herself ragged, but good. The next bastard who tried to murder her for doing her job, and doing it well, could kiss her beautiful ass.
And—it was a beautiful ass. She told herself, most every day, after the shooting. And only stopped after she actually believed it. She had become more confident, more bubbly and happy and crazy good and crazy weird. It reminded her of something she had watched, or read somewhere: the more enemies you had, the better a job you were doing. Being shot was, in some small way, a testament to how hard she was rocking her job.
Sure, she wasn't the girl that men wrote songs about after seeing her across the room in a smoky bar. She'd never liked smoky bars, anyway. And the kinds of men who frequented them probably weren't her type.
She'd had Kevin, for a long time. And that had gone a long way to building her confidence back up. After Kevin there was Sam. He was sweet, he really was. But he let her control everything. Sure, she liked to control things. But she was in control, she made sure of it, of almost every area of her life. She had been since her parents had died. Occasionally, though she didn't like to admit it, she needed someone else to take the reins and do some planning, make some ground rules that she could follow, if only for a little while. After Sam, there had been Steve, and Todd, and Brian. All of them had meant well, but there was nothing there, with any of them. All of them was sweet, but sweet just wasn't enough.
There were no sparks. And that was the little speech she used to end each and every one. Kevin had never understood why she kept the apartment, and why she would never move in with him, and why she couldn't marry him. Kevin had probably been a mistake. Worse, Kevin subconsciously knew he had been a mistake. Worst of all, he undoubtedly knew she was in love with her best friend, in a way she could never be with him.