She blinked, and her expression changed from sly amusement to one of confusion. He had his Penny back. She looked tough yet vulnerable as she realized she was once again in control of her own body. With a glad cry, she threw herself into Sheldon's arms, toppling him over onto the leather couch. She fitted her body against his with a satisfied purring sound. He pulled himself into a sitting position, but Penny remained clinging to him.

"I know what you did for me," she said. "I never thought you cared that much about me, but I'm so happy you do."

"I suppose I was not aware of it either," he replied slowly. "It took the greatest set-back of my life to show me what I truly valued. But this isn't what you wanted, is it?" he asked. "I was so focused on not losing you that I'm afraid I contrived a somewhat poor bargain. I made an emotional decision, which is completely unlike me."

Penny couldn't help but smile when he said that. Sheldon often got emotional, but only with negative feelings like fear and anger.

"You did what you had to do to save me," she replied gently. "I remember what my life was like before, but it's fading away like a dream. I was wasting my life away. I may only get to live a part of it now, but I'm going to make every minute of it count."

She reached for him with a suggestive smile. He reluctantly disentangled her arms from around her neck. "You weren't in love with me before," he stated gravely. "How can you still be the Penny I knew if your feelings toward me have changed?"

She leaned back and looked him in the eye, very seriously. "Your feelings for me have changed, haven't they?"

He nodded slowly. "Yes. I have considered you a friend for a long time, but the bond between us deepened gradually. When I was forced to drastic action in order to rescue you, I realized that I could only allow you to get so close if I… loved you."

"And I love you," she answered, sighing happily. "It doesn't matter how it happened. My life was going nowhere fast until a couple of days ago. Now, I'm absolutely crazy about you, and I can promise you those feelings will never change as long as she's a part of me. And I'm going to be a famous movie star because that's what she wants. And if those two things just happen to make me insanely happy too, who am I to argue?"

She leaned in to kiss him, and this time, he let her. No, he wanted her to. He could feel her mysterious allure drawing him in, and he was helpless against it. He began to understand that he would also need to give up part of his life, the part where he could do exactly what he wanted in a completely self-indulgent manner. It seemed a small price to pay.

He drew back before he completely lost all sense of where he was and what he was doing. "We can't simply start dating. It would raise too many red flags, especially with Raj and Howard. If they begin to suspect anything unusual and contact the warehouse agents, she might feel threatened. I won't do anything that might endanger you."

His concern earned him a smile. "I'm an actress," Penny said. "If anyone's behavior is going to start raising red flags, it's yours. But I think I know a way to make this look like it happened naturally. Now that Leonard is gone, they'll expect his death to hit both of us pretty hard. After some time has passed, you can tell Raj and Howard that we turned to each for comfort while we were grieving. They'll think us dating is some weird rebound thing, but they won't think it has anything to do with that stupid orb or her." She sighed. "I guess until we're ready to tell them, I'll have to make myself scarce."

Sheldon frowned at her in confusion. "Why is that?"

She slid onto his lap. "Because you get this adorable goofy grin on your face every time you look at me. It's a dead giveaway."

His eyebrows rose in surprise, and he patted his face with his fingertips as if to ascertain if she was telling the truth. She was. "I see. Does this mean that we need to stop spending time together until we make our relationship public?"

"Hell no, that means I'll just be sneaking into your bed late at night," Penny grinned.

"Oh, thank heaven," he groaned, and gave up all pretense of aloofness as he pressed her back against the sofa cushions on his spot.

Penny's elaborate scheme was hardly necessary. Their friends had already figured out for themselves that Sheldon and Penny together made a weird kind of sense. If they all missed Leonard (and Sheldon did, even after Leonard's underhanded sabotage of the monopole experiment), it only drew them closer together. Sheldon and Raj started collaborating together on a new research project about dark matter, and Howard leveraged his NASA experience to gain several lucrative consulting deals in the privatized space industry.

Thanks to the supernatural influence of Penny's alter ego, she got the very next part she tried out for. In just a few years, she was one of the fastest rising young starlets in Hollywood. After she had a conversation with Sheldon's department head, Gablehauser agreed to give Sheldon whatever funds or equipment he needed for his research. Howard and Raj eagerly pitched in to help him in their spare time. When Penny discovered that they were monopolizing her boyfriend on the weekends, she decided to find girlfriends for both of them. She introduced Howard to Bernadette, a petite microbiologist who was working her way through a doctoral degree, waitressing at the Cheesecake Factory. Penny had been thinking they might hit it off, even before the guys returned from the Arctic. She had a harder time finding someone who would be perfect for Raj until she met a psychology grad student at Caltech. Meera was writing her thesis on selective mutism and within just a few months, Raj started talking to women without the aid of alcohol. She was also half-Indian on her father's side. After years of seeing their son date American girls, his parents enthusiastically approved the match.

Sheldon and Penny married in a very private ceremony just weeks before the release of the first movie in which she had top billing. Sheldon continued to work toward his lifelong dream of winning the Nobel Prize, but he had to balance his scholarly pursuits with an increasingly full family life. Pete's prediction came true. Sheldon and Penny eventually had seven children, a fact that never failed to astonish him. He won his Nobel just weeks after their third child and first daughter was born. He immediately set his sights on a second Nobel.

Sheldon and Penny had been married for over twenty years when the last person in the world they expected, showed up on their doorstep.

Penny looked through the peephole with a curious frown on her face. By this point, they had a high-tech surveillance system and a security team guarding their house. People didn't just show up and knock on their door, but this man did and he seemed familiar. She opened the door and stared at the older man with the broad, knowing grin.

"Do I know you?" she asked. She hadn't heard Sheldon come up behind her, but she could sense his presence, a warm solid wall at her back.

"Agent Pete Lattimer," Sheldon said, and his voice was glacial. "What are you doing here?"

"It's just Mr. Lattimer now; I'm retired," Pete said with a rueful grin. "But I can still beat a crack security team and top-of-the-line surveillance with one hand tied behind my back," he added proudly.

Penny gasped. "You were one of the agents. You were there when I…" She broke off, not knowing how she could talk about her other personality.

"Yeah, you hit me with a baseball bat. Kinda hard to forget you," Pete replied. He looked down for a moment, and then faced them. "There was always something that didn't sit right with me about your case. I've followed your careers throughout the years, but apart from phenomenal success, you've kept your noses clean. I just had to know how you snuck an artifact past us. I mean, I know I'm good, but somehow you amateurs got the better of us. So how did you do it?"

Sheldon studied his face warily. "What would you do with such information, assuming we have it and are willing to provide it to you?"

Pete shrugged. "This is just for my own personal satisfaction. My partner Myka, well, she's been gone a long time. After we lost her, I teamed up with Claudia for a while, but it just wasn't the same. When she became the new caretaker of the warehouse, I figured I was too old for field work. For a while, I helped train new recruits. But I left before they could start to feel sorry for me, some old geezer who didn't know when it was time to quit. I thought I was done, that I could walk away cleanly. But after all those years, your case was still the one that kept nagging at the back of my mind. So I figured I'd drop in on you… I mean, what do I have to lose?"

Sheldon and Penny exchanged glances, and he could see the subtle shift in her expression as her alter ego emerged. She nodded slightly, and then Penny—his Penny, he could always tell—stepped aside and held open the door. "Come in, Mr. Lattimer," she said with a gracious smile.

Once they were comfortably ensconced in the living room, Sheldon began to speak. It was extremely odd to finally be confessing his secret after all these years, but in a way, it was also a relief to have someone who wouldn't think he was crazy if he told it. "There was no other artifact," he began. "The orb was merely a vessel for a supernatural entity which possessed Penny. After my friend Leonard was killed trying to seduce the entity, I realized that she was too powerful. You and your team seemed more interested in damage control and containment than in saving Penny's life. As you may recall, Leonard and my other two friends, Raj and Howard, had recently betrayed me, leading me to the conclusion that Penny was my only real friend. I was determined to do whatever I had to do to rescue her, so I switched sides, in a matter of speaking. I bargained with the entity for Penny to have some freedom to live her life. In exchange, I promised to protect her by allowing you and your team to believe she had been driven out by your half-baked theory about true love."

Pete shrugged. "It wasn't the first time true love won out over some artifact's juju. And I see you did get the girl," he added, casting a quizzical look in Penny's direction.

"Actually, I was the one who got the guy," Penny said. She smiled and laid a hand on Sheldon's knee. "She's had many titles over thousands of years, but the last time people knew about her, they called her Freya and worshipped her as the goddess of love and fertility. Sheldon wasn't interested in love or marriage or having a family. For him, it really was a hard choice to give up the single life."

"It wasn't that difficult," Sheldon murmured, lacing his fingers through hers. "Once our bargain was sealed, it gave Freya more power. I started feeling like I loved Penny right around that time. We've both questioned whether our feelings are genuine, but since we have been so happy together, it's difficult to examine that theory very closely."

"Huh. So all she really wanted was to make you fall in love?" Pete asked with a grimace of confusion.

Penny's face grew serious. "No. What she wanted was to be loved and adored. She used her powers to make me into a world-famous actress. That's the modern day equivalent to being a goddess, I guess. And…" She hesitated, glancing at her husband. "There's not a single guy that she wants that's ever been able to say no to her. She only leaves them alone if they're truly in love, and I know from experience, that's a pretty rare thing in Hollywood."

"I don't understand." Pete looked back and forth between the two of them. "I mean, I've heard the tabloid gossip… the open marriage, the affairs. But if you love this guy as much as you say—"

"It's not me, it's her," Penny said quickly. "That was part of the bargain Sheldon made with her. When I'm with him, I'm completely myself. But the rest of the time, she takes over and does what she wants… what she needs to, I think. Sheldon knows how much I love him, and that I would never cheat on him. It doesn't matter what the rest of the world thinks."

Pete sat back and whistled softly. "That couldn't have been easy for either one of you," he said softly, privately thinking that such an arrangement would have driven him crazy with jealousy. Many people believed that Cooper, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist, simply didn't care about his wife' infidelity. Friends and colleagues had described him as cold, unfeeling, even robotic. Pete knew that he had been allowed to see into a part of their lives that few people even knew existed. Sheldon wasn't cold or unfeeling. He had just poured all of his emotional energy into protecting the woman he loved and their family.

"Penny is correct," Sheldon replied, interrupting Pete's train of thought. "Before the incident, I had spent most of my life being mocked and misunderstood. In that respect, nothing changed, and yet my life was infinitely improved by her presence."

"And you really did end up having lots of kids," Pete commented, his eyes drawn to a large family portrait hanging over the mantel. The photo had been taken at the beach, and in it, Sheldon and Penny shared a private look over the heads of their children, in various stages of life from toddler to teenager, who were ranged about them.

"Four girls and three boys," Penny said with a laugh. "I know she influenced me in that, because I never wanted to have kids before. And every time someone mentions to Sheldon that he has seven children, he still manages to look shocked."

"It's all her fault," Sheldon muttered in a surly tone, but he was smiling as he said it.

"You know you could never say no to me," she answered lightly, and the look he gave her in return made Pete feel like an interloper.

Pete cleared his throat uncomfortably. "Well, um, I'm glad you guys managed to make it work out for you. Thanks for talking to me. Your secret's safe with me." He rose to take his leave, and then paused and looked at Penny, frowning slightly. "What happens to her—Freya, I mean—after you, um, you know…"

"When I'm dead?" Penny asked with a wry smile.

Pete nodded sheepishly, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand.

"Mr. Lattimer, there are hundreds of pretty young women who would do a lot more than give up part of their lives if it meant becoming a star. She'll choose someone, I'll take her on as a protégé, and then when the time comes, she'll move on."

"And what'll happen to you?" Pete asked.

Penny looked over at Sheldon and took his hand again. "I love my husband, and I don't want to live without him. Because of her, I know I'll be there for him right up to the end, and then I'll join him, and we'll be together forever."

"You know there is no scientific evidence for a continued existence after death," Sheldon objected.

"Yeah, I know," Penny said. "It doesn't matter. Some things you just have to take by faith."

Pete cleared his throat, drawing both their gazes back to him. "I've seen a lot of strange things in my time… things that seem to have no rational explanation. I think your wife might be closer to the truth than you give her credit for. I should be going. Thanks for your time." He shook both their hands, and they escorted him out. As Pete walked out the front gate (much to the bewilderment of the security guards, who hadn't seen him enter), he shook his head in disbelief. To be in love your whole life, to have a family and success and wealth… even knowing all that the Coopers had endured, he had to admit, he was a little jealous.

The End