I was surprised how easy it was to write this chapter, once I actually sat down and thought through it.

Her body was a soft lump under the covers next to his, warm and sleepy and happy.

She rolled around and pressed her face into her pillow, her hand making its way to rest on his hip. She murmured his name between a handful of snores, and he murmured something incomprehensible back.

"Are you awake?" he said, and shifted so he was looking down at her curled frame. Her face blurred every time he tried to get a good look at her, like a camera going out of focus, so he could never be sure who she was.

She was familiar, though. Familiar and lovely and sweet-smelling.

"Mmm," she said in response. "Leonard?"

He reached out to touch her, but something stopped him, and his hand was left lying there while he waited for something else to happen.

"Yeah," he replied, his throat and voice feeling odd, warped and rough and strange. "It's me."

"What's keeping you up?" she asked in her light voice, like feathers, or the drizzling of honey, or the sunlight through the trees.

"I don't know," his brow furrowed, because this was his only answer. He didn't know, and that made him confused and mad and with so many questions he felt like his throat were to burst if he tried to voice all of them.

"Oh, sweetie," she said, and he felt fingers touch his face, sending a pulse of warmth through his body. "You poor baby. Come here."

He moved closer, her head nestling against his chest and her arm wrapping around his waist, her breath hot and deep and comfortable. "Go back to sleep, Leonard,"

He shut his eyes, and as he did so, he was aware of a new and different heartbeat in his veins.

And came to the confusing, strange conclusion, that it must have been hers.

XXX

Leonard woke up feeling out of breath, his throat raw and tired and still singing with those questions.

"Priya—" he said, until he remembered, remembered that Priya wasn't there, had been called in for early work for the last week and a half and had decided to stay in Raj's apartment as a precaution.

He tried to think of just what had woken him, why he was lying there tangled in bed covers, panting and struggling against foreign flashes of dark and trembling memories. But that was all that came to him: flashes, snips of words and letters and limbs and sensations piling on top of one another until the ceilings were collapsing with the magnitude of it all.

Flashes. Familiar. Heartbeat. Touch, smell, feathers and honey. Happy.

And one other thing, but this one was the one that made his stomach twist and his breath quiver out in smouldering gasps, the one that made his heart line with lead.

Sweetie.

XXX

It was five-forty-three, two and a half hours after he'd been startled awake by his—dream? Nightmare? Hallucination?—and he pulled his dressing gown around him as his eyes set upon the woman he was sure would be the death of him someday, possibly far sooner than he realised.

"Morning, Penny. But what on earth are you doing up so early?"

Something glossed over her eyes, but her smile—her dazzling, beautiful smile, like lanterns cutting through perpetual darkness—replaced it too quickly for him to get a chance at identifying it. "It must be insomnia. You're... rubbing off on me." She said, and the tones in her voice wavered, jumping higher then lower with the spaces between her words.

Her hair was messy and curling around her eyes and her cheeks, tossed up into a haphazard half thought through bun that was dissolving as he watched her, blinking at him, smiling at him, saying words that split apart before they hit his ears.

"I'm sorry, what did you say?" He said, starting to shake his head.

Her frown was only a half frown, a smile still haunting her lips—and he had the brief, idiotic thought that maybe she was haunting him. "I said, can I come inside? I'll make you coffee."

"I—well—"

She placed a hand on his shoulder. "I think the answer you're looking for is sure."

She slid past him, resting her fingers on his cheek as she did so, and that same warm pulse sighed through his body.

He pressed a hand against his forehead and shut the door, pivoting on his heel to follow after her as she went on to the kitchen.

"How's Priya?" she asked with her back turned to him, fussing over instant packets and slow roasts. "Still sick?"

He shook his head. "No. She's at the firm. She's been called in early."

Her shoulders tensed, then relaxed. But he was just paranoid. Seeing things that weren't there. He was just paranoid.

He scoured for something else to talk about, something that wouldn't make him feel like his heart was swirling down a plughole. "I'll have my coffee—"

She let out a sharp breath. But he mustn't have heard it. He mustn't have heard it, because when she turned around, she was smiling at him, saying, "I know what kind of coffee you like, Leonard."

"I—of course you do."

She cocked her head. "What's wrong, Leonard? Tell me. You can tell me," she swerved around the bench to stand in front of him. "You can always tell me."

No, he couldn't. He couldn't, because she was wrecked, and spoiled, and whenever he looked at her he saw the sun with different shades of blonde hair and a smile that was brighter than any supernova. Somebody that knew too many of his secrets already.

There was no way he could win in this situation, not as long as she lived only a handful of steps away and he felt like being within a metre radius of her was sure to burn him alive.

And he didn't know why he was thinking like this. He didn't know why he felt like this, angry and lonely and lost all at the same time.

He didn't know why she couldn't stop smiling at him.

He knew he needed her to go. She needed to go, she needed to stop smiling at him, she needed to stop making his heart feel so hollow yet so full at the same time.

He needed her to go, but he didn't want her to go and parts of him—stupid, sporadic parts—never wanted her to stop smiling at him. Never, so long as he lived, and if he could capture her in this moment—her spiral hair now half falling down her back, her face without any makeup—if he could make the world stop in its tilt, for just one moment, he would, he would do that, and he would remain forever in this moment here, with Penny smiling at him.

But he couldn't do that.

And for this one, imperfect moment, she needed to stop smiling at him and she needed to leave.

But that fantasy would always be there. Even as she cut through him with dampened, hurt eyes, that fantasy would always be there.

That he would someday have the power to make the world cease its turning, it would halt on its axis, and he would remain there like that, for an eternity.

With Penny smiling at him.

That's weird. FFN says 'sighed' is an incorrect spelling.