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The one where they're older.
He teaches, now. The restless, difficult intensity that characterized his youth has been tempered by time and a full trophy-case of accolades. He still does some research on the side, sometimes still helps the younger professors with their projects, but he finds teaching uniquely satisfying; it's simply one more way to pass along his legacy.
The students like him well enough. His introductory lecture on the physics of Superman is cited as one of the most common reasons for transfers to the department. He owns a little house with a front lawn, and he keeps a cat in memory of his Meemaw. On Wednesdays he still meets Leonard at the comic book store and they go out for dinner; every other month he drives down to Texas to visit his sister and her children. He likes the long drives. They give him time to think.
She moves into the house next door one summer. She keeps to herself for the most part—some mornings he'll catch a flash of her yellow hair through the window—but when the nights start to lengthen, she knocks on his door and asks to borrow a ladder.
He thinks of his mother (now deceased) and offers her not only the ladder but his assistance. Under her watchful eye, he changes the lightbulb in her living room, checks her fire alarms, and resets her garage door opener. She repays him by extending an invitation for dinner; she's only having soup, something easy, but that suits his schedule nicely and he agrees to stay.
She is divorced, has no children, and records audio books for a living. He likes how she doesn't let him intimidate her and how she keeps her bathrooms spotless. They move in together just after his hair starts going gray.
On one memorable occasion, she steals his computer and notifies all his students that he's taking the week off. He retaliates by stringing her underwear up on the telephone line.
The one with zombies.
She meets the twins on Highway 30 just west of Texarkana; her brother's SUV died without a whimper just as she plowed her way between a pile-up of motorcycles and an overturned eighteen-wheeler, and she'd had to climb out through the passenger window. It took half an hour to dig herself a path to the rear hatch and rescue her shotgun; the back of her neck tingled the whole time.
She's dragging her suitcase along the shoulder of the road, wondering idly if the next station will have nail polish, when she hears the truck. First there's the sound of glass shattering and metal sheering and then the thing pulls into view, a big black half-ton with the number "42" painted in white on the driver-side door. This stretch of road's pretty desolate, but she racks the slide on the Springfield 9mm tucked in the waistband of her jeans and settles in to wait.
The truck roars past her, skids to a halt, and backs up thirty feet. A woman steps out. The woman does not have boils, gangrene, or the remains of a baby's small intestine dangling from her mouth. She also doesn't look like she's going to shoot Penny for her last twinkie, and, y'know, that's something.
"Hi," Penny says. "You don't want to eat my brains, or anything...?" She's maybe a little out of practice with conversational gambits.
"Lord, no!" the woman says. "You gonna eat mine?"
"Not unless I turn into a zombie," Penny promises.
"Well alright then," the woman says, and grins big, straight white teeth and Penny didn't even know people could smile like that anymore. The woman's dressed in heavy boots and jeans, some kinda cut-down rifle strapped to her leg. "My brother and I are headed west. You need a ride?"
"Oh God yes please," Penny says, and then hopes she doesn't sound too desperate.
"Hope on in," the woman says. Penny tosses her suitcase in the back; the tires are bloody, but really, what tires aren't these days? The backseat is piled high with phonebooks—one for every city between Texas and Georgia. What the fuck, Penny thinks, and shoves a couple over to make room.
"I'm Oleander, and this here's my brother Galveston, because we can't both be Galveston, isn't that right?" Oleander keeps grinning when she says it, but the look she throws at the man in the passenger seat is a look universal to sisters across U.S.Z., all thirty-six of them. "Where you from, hon?"
"Omaha," Penny says.
"Omaha is what we'll call you, then," Oleander says, and revs the engine, and floors it. Her nails, Omaha notes with no little amount of jealousy, are perfectly manicured, red with little moon-tips of white. Beside her, Galveston tugs at his seat belt and then folds his arms across his chest.
"So," Omaha asks him, "what'd you guys do before?"
"Waited tables at Fuddrucker's," Oleander calls back, irrepressibly cheerful. She has her window rolled down and the speedometer pushing ninety.
"Yeah? Me too," Omaha calls back. "What'd you do, Galveston?"
"He was a rocket scientist!" Oleander shouts. "Some kinda super genius, always makin' sonic death rays and taking apart my Easy Bake Oven when we were kids!"
"Does, uh," Omaha says, and wonders how to best phrase this delicately. "Does he talk?"
"Girl, you don't know the half of it!" Oleander-the-waitress cranks up the radio. "He doesn't know when to shut up!"
*
Five hours later:
"You guys mind if we pull over somewhere? I really, really have to pee!"
*
And then:
"Stop! Stop! Don't go in the bathroom!"
"Oh my God, Gally, she has got to use the toilet sometime!"
"Well I refuse to be the reason that humanity loses yet another genetic donor! Based on my calculations, a mere five percent of the country's original population remains uninfected, a number that is decreasing exponentially every day, and it's an elementary fact that zombies are more likely to prey on the isolated or incapacitated—in addition to which, 'beware of bathrooms' is number three on my survival list, and I don't think I need to remind you—"
Yeah, Omaha decides, and squeezes her knees together. She really didn't know the half of it.
*
Still later:
"—which can be traced back to Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later, although of course some might argue that the infected in that aren't actually zombies, in which case the phenomenon originates in the classic video game Resident Evil and subsequently the film House of the Dead—"
"Can you shut your mouth for half a second? Where did Omaha go?"
(A shriek.)
"Omaha? Omaha?"
"I told her not to go to the bathroom!"
*
Sometimes she wonders:
How did her life get to be like this? Why here? Why now? Why couldn't mad cow disease stay in the cows where it belonged? Why did she have to die with her pants around her knees and a wad of toilet paper stuck to her shoe? (Her shoe!) ...What kind of a world did she live in where she was happy when a zombie's head exploded all over her face?
She hiked her pants up and kicked open what was let of the stall door—girl's gotta have her priorities, after all—to see Galveston standing with a hunting rifle racked against his shoulder. "Nice save," she said.
"I should hope so," he said. "I have spent a cumulative two-hundred and four hours playing Left 4 Dead."
Yeah, he definitely looked like the type to play some stupid zombie game. Tall and pale and sort of spidery, but his hands on the rifle's stock were surprising steady.
"...Whatever, thanks, and let's get out of here." Her gun was leaning against the wall next to a sink. Teach her not to pee armed.
"Also," he said, and held the door open for her, "there's a horde outside."
"...What?!"
"And since my sister is occupied defending our vehicle, I would like to note that I am not a rocket scientist, but rather a theoretical physicist. Duck!"
She ducked, he swung his rifle by the barrel and smashed in the face of one undead lady (extra-fast variety), and she came up shooting.
"Really, saying I'm a rocket scientist is downright insulting!"
*
If she kisses him after he cobbles together a pipe bomb from the spare parts he finds behind the Quick-Trip's cash register, it's only because they're practically the last two people on Earth.
Mostly that's why, at least.
The one where they're roommates.
Leonard wakes up the first morning in his new apartment to the sound of a door slamming open. "Oh my God, Sheldon, did you use fabric softener on my underwear again?" shrieks an obviously female voice.
"Did you leave you laundry in the dryer overnight again?"
"...That is completely not relevant, and I've asked you to quit with the fabric softener!"
"Fabric softener"—the man's voice is high, biting, and weirdly familiar—"reduces wrinkling, improves iron glide, and increases resistance to stains. I don't understand why you're so resistant to—"
"Okay, first, it irritates my skin, and second, my underwear!"
"Then maybe you should do your wash yourself!"
Leonard buries his head under the pillow. Bad enough that his mom's coming for Thanksgiving; now he has batcrap crazy neighbors, too. Weren't there enough crazy people in his life?
*
He'd envisioned the people in 4A as an older married couple, but reality seems determined to slap him in the face. That afternoon he's unpacking his comic books, door propped open to provide a cross-breeze, when a perky blond woman appears in the hallway like a vision from on high.
"Hey, you must be the new guy, right?"
"Um," Leonard says. "Yes?" Actual words, go him.
"Hi, I'm Penny!" She sticks her hand out and he trips over a box of back-issues in his eagerness to take it. New job, new apartment...new girlfriend? (A girlfriend?)
"Hi," he says.
"Hi...?"
"Hi, I'm Leonard." He lets go of her hand. Not awkward here, no sir, he thinks, and tries to think of cool things. Winter. Batman. Liquid nitrogen.
"I live across the hall with my roommate." Penny twists around. "Hang on—Sheldon! Shel-don!"
Aha. Now he recognizes her voice from this morning.
"Yes?" calls the hopefully-gay roommate.
"Sheldon, come meet our new neighbor!"
"I've already inserted the DVD for Battlestar Galactica!"
"Put it on pause!" She stands on tiptoe to peer over his shoulder. "...Leonard has comic books!"
Magic words, because just like that the please-be-gay roommate appears. Tall, thin, and yep, definitely familiar. "Hey, I know you!" Leonard says, infinitely more comfortable with someone who speaks his language. Comics, Battlestar Galactica, plaid pants; here is a member of his species. "We work together at CalTech." Sheldon stares at him. "...In the physics department?"
"Ah, yes," says Sheldon, who doesn't seem gay so much as asexual. "You're the latest of Gablehauser's ill-advised hires."
Penny whacks her roommate in the sternum and grins brightly. Leonard is not at all afraid of her teeth. Mostly not afraid. Maybe just a little.
Penny's fist starts to rise again. "Do you prefer Marvel or DC?" Sheldon spits out.
"Uh, DC. Not that I don't like Marvel, but—"
"Batman or the Flash?"
"...Do I have to choose?"
"Loop quantum gravity or string theory?"
"String theory, but I'm not sure what—"
"Excellent. Penny, tell Leonard he may join us for Halo night."
"Tell him yourself, you big freak!"
And that's how he meets his neighbors.
*
On Halo night number three he finally works up the courage to say something.
"So, Penny, are you and Sheldon...?"
"No!" she yelps. "...Mostly no. Definitely not not yes. It's more that the box is still closed, if you know what I mean?"
"You know what? I'm just going to count myself lucky to have met someone who knows the difference between D&D and GURPS."
"I swear," Penny says. "Even after Sheldon I sometimes do not understand what comes out of you people's mouths."
The one with swimming.
Sheldon's one of those t-shirt swimmers, which surprises exactly—oh yeah—nobody. He actually tried to wear a wetsuit, but the pool management wouldn't let him. Also, he couldn't afford one; the whole point of working at the pool was to earn money for...yellow-cake uranium, or something like that. A sonic death ray. Whatever.
Also also, he wears Noxzema on his nose. Just a big spot of white across the bridge like he's some eighty-year-old power walker from Florida.
"Couldn't you wear sunscreen?" She's on her break, scarfing down a hotdog while Sheldon mans the deep end.
"Noxzema is a time-honored preventative for sunburn, Penny," he lectures her. "It was originally called the 'miracle cream of Baltimore' due to—"
"Yeah, but," she says, and licks mustard from the ball of her thumb. Sheldon's eyes follow her, so she deliberately smears a little more across her palm. When her tongue flicks between her fingers, he swallows hard. "We had to go to the old-people pharmacy to find it."
"I'm also wearing sunscreen," he offers.
"I'm so surprised." For once he picks up on the dryness in her tone and doesn't go all junior-professor on her about kinesics, or his failure to read body cues, or whatever else floats around that big ol' brain of his.
More importantly: would he freak if she smeared mustard on his neck? He's not big on PDA or uncleanliness, but if she aims for the spot just under his jaw...
A little kid screeches and she decides against it. Anyway, there are worse summer jobs than lifeguarding with her boyfriend. She gets to see his elbows, which is worth the three hours it took to convince him that reading about swimming online was not the same as taking a course at the YMCA.
The one where it all goes wrong.
She marries Leonard.
She marries Leonard because she doesn't know she has another choice. She marries him because he does not cheat on her, because he does not deal meth or he steal her television or assault her with sleazy propositions. She marries him because she thinks he's the better choice, but she could be loved, oh, she could be loved—
Sheldon wouldn't follow her like a small animal whining for its mother. Sheldon wouldn't prostrate himself for her approval, or accept that she has only the talent to go so far and no more. He would love her as only he is capable, proudly, fiercely, he would challenge her and she would fling his challenge right back, turn the mirror around so he would rise with her. With him she wouldn't need ethanol to be drunk, her eyes would spark and crackle of their own accord.
And how can he speak of love, how can he speak of love to her? He knows about the birth of universes but he can no more tell her this than he can will his feet off the ground and fly away. How can he tell her when he doesn't realize himself until he sees her in her wedding gown, until he is forced to confront exactly what he's sacrificing for the man he calls friend?
For a month he obsesses. (This is their honeymoon month.) He pours over journal after journal, reads about dopamine, oxytocin, Helen Fisher, mammalian biological drives. He reads Shakespeare. He watches romantic comedies. He keeps meticulous notes and then flings them away in disgust. He turns to comic books: Dick and Babs, Peter and MJ, Mr. Fantastic and the Invisible Woman. The last one defeats him. Why does Sue Storm love Reed Richards? The universe declines to answer.
They come home. They have a son, and a daughter, and another son. Sheldon watches, takes care of the children occasionally, and still is no closer to a conclusion. Would she have—? If he'd said, if he'd done—would this be his son, his daughter with Penny's cornflower hair?
He wonders if there's someone else suited to him, spends another month in consultation with the world, and decides: no. He doesn't have it in him to feel this twice; he isn't built that way. Even when he was a child he knew it would be physics, would have to be that specifically; nothing else would do, although he had considerable talent in pure mathematics, in music, in programming, in—
He never tells her how she could have been loved.
The one where they're younger.
None of her other friends get why she hangs around Sheldon. She's pretty; she has two distinct eyebrows; she was (almost) the head cheerleader. Sheldon doesn't go anywhere without a tiny bottle of hand sanitizer. Sometimes two, just in case he's forced to touch a doorknob.
"It would be a non-issue if the custodians kept the bathroom supplied with paper towels."
"Really," Penny says, and snaps her gum just to annoy him.
"I suspect that the majority of students and staff don't even bother to follow the posted hand-washing procedures."
"You don't say." If he keeps this up she's going to pop in Billy Idol. Sheldon hates Billy Idol.
"Last week one of the cafeteria workers left without even approaching the sink!" His outrage is mildly adorable, but Penny has listened to Lecture #35 (The Sanitary Integrity of Public Schools) nearly as many times as she's seen Return of the Jedi, i.e., more than enough.
"Please, Sheldon, tell me about the toilets next," she deadpans.
"Ooh," he says, and she knows this one is going to be a doozy. "Do you want to know an interesting thing about public restrooms? Statistics show that the first stall is likely to be the cleanest."
"...Wow."
"Oh, it's a well-documented—was that sarcasm?"
"I can see why they put you in the AP classes."
"Was that sarcasm?"
"Yes!"
"...What that—"
"No, Sheldon." Out of the corner of her eye she catches his hands tightening around the seatbelt. The moment he climbs out of her car she knows the seatbelt will be replaced with the strap of his messenger bag. Even though she's had two years to adjust to it, it's still weird to realize that his hands are now so much larger than her own. He was such a scrawny little kid, all skinny limbs and big blue eyes. Kind of like a squid.
"Social interaction," he sighs, like it's some big mystery. "I suppose you're attending the...dance, this weekend?"
Penny hesitates, letting the car drift down the street under its own power. She thinks about Sheldon on Saturday night, sitting alone in his trailer. Sheldon is without a doubt the most brilliant person she knows; he is so freaking smart that she doesn't understand half the things that come of his mouth, so smart that it scares her. He has one enormous brain minus a drunk dad and a dead mother and an absent brother and a sister who pretends he doesn't exist, which puts him so far on the negative side of zero that Penny wants to scream. If she adds herself to balance the scales—
And she thinks about last year's prom, how her date already had a hotel room booked and never bothered to ask. Her response was to throw her shoes at his head and run away, which seemed like a great plan until she ended up wandering around downtown Galveston at two in the morning, barefoot and wearing a formal gown (absolutely gorgeous gray silk, it had cost three paychecks but up to that point she'd thought the money well-spent). There was this dumpster down an alley, and she'd tucked herself beside it and called Sheldon and stayed huddled there until he pulled up in his dad's truck (even though he hated to drive more than he hated Billy Idol or maybe even germs).
"Actually," she says, "I was kind of hoping you'd wanna come over and play Halo."
The one where she solves equations and he waits tables.
It isn't that she's socially retarded, just that she no longer has patience for the special brand of idiot that cares what kind of toxic paraben derivative you use to paint your eyelids. She's not even a super-genius like a lot of the guys she works with, but she enjoys her job and she's good at it.
And when she says she has no tolerance for idiots of any sort, however special? That includes her new neighbor.
He's tall and gangling and reminds her of a cactus. His jeans are worn down at the heels, his t-shirt is the exact non-color gray of television static, and his hair looks like it's been cut with a Cuisinart.
"Hi," she says. So she's polite—she's from Nebraska, it's a thing.
He turns to face her, keys in hand, his demeanor that of a mountain that deigns to notice a weed. "Is there something you need?" he drawls, his voice high and biting.
Wow. Blue eyes, really blue, blue in a way that makes her think of the days she takes her little Cessna SkyCatcher off the coast and just lazes between heaven and earth; hot blue, like the sky, and deep blue like the sea.
She rallies her wits. "I'm your new neighbor. Penny," she adds, and stretches out a hand.
He looks at her like she just spit on her palm. "And your point is?"
"...Clearly not taken." Her teeth are maybe grinding a little bit. Not loud enough to hear. "If you'll excuse me." And with that (weak weak weak) parting shot she marches back to her apartment, slamming the door before he can make the grand exit.
*
So she doesn't suffer fools—fact—but she doesn't lie to herself either, or at least not often enough to make it a habit. He intrigues her. Thirty or just under it, only a couple years older than she is, and he's almost always alone. He seems to have no friends, no family, and no discernible interests outside of eating takeout (seven days a week), comic books (he has a sack of them when he gets his mail on Wednesdays), and work (he waits tables at the Cheesecake Factory; she recognizes his uniform).
He is also unusually bitter (she says unusually, but in point of fact bitterness seems very usual for him) and unusually interested in her International Journal of Mechanical, Industrial, and Aerospace Engineering. She catches him eyeing it over her shoulder one afternoon as she chucks junk mail into the trashcan.
"Are you interesting in engineering?" she asks Sheldon—she got his name from the building manager—and his face contorts.
"Are you?" he counters.
Penny grins and holds up a coupon booklet, pretending to read an ad on the back but actually studying her neighbor's face. "I'd hope so. I am an engineer."
Bingo. His eyebrows practically sprint up his forehead. After fifteen or twenty seconds of rapid-fire twitches, he clears his throat. "What field?"
"Aerospace," she says. "You might call me a...rocket scientist."
"Incongruous," he mutters, and then at a normal volume, "If I were inclined to call you anything, which I am not." He collects his keys and turns his back to her.
Definitely incongruous. She wouldn't think a man who waits tables for a living would know how to properly use the subjunctive.
*
"Why aerospace?" he asks the next time they meet. The weather is wicked, big golfballs of hail pounding down; all Penny can do is cross her fingers and pray that her poor little car's windshields survive. Sheldon's truck, she figures, won't be much worse off than it already is, mostly because it already looks like it's been mauled by an angry bear.
He scowls. "I don't like bears."
She plunks down on the steps next to her umbrella. "...Okay." For that bit of information and he curiosity, she figures she can tell him a little more about herself. "I always wanted to fly, but you don't make as much money with a degree in aviation as you do with a degree in aeronautical engineer."
"So you went with the more technical degree, work at—"
"The university."
"—and now have the income to fly for recreation."
She's pretty impressed he managed to piece all that together. "And now I fly for fun." She shrugs. "My uncle's a cropduster. It's really his fault."
He fidgets with his keys, threading a long finger through the ring. "How about you?" Penny asks. "Do you have any hobbies, or anything? I fly and I like to dance with my friends and ooh, let's see, sometimes I fill in as a bartender on weekends."
"...I play Halo." He's looking at his shoes again. It took her weeks to puzzle out that odd thread of shyness.
"Anything else?"
His eyes fall half-closed, and he gives her that heavy, shuttered look. That look, the one she's come to expect anytime she asks him too many questions. What can she say—it's in her nature to be curious, that's why she's so good at what she does, but they've been at this strange dance for six months now and she still feels like she's scaling a cliff that keeps growing.
*
And then she figures out the key to his heart. It's not through his stomach; it's through his brain.
*
She brings her work home with her sometimes. Her duties at the universally are evenly split between teaching and research, but she has a light class-load this semester and she's collaborating with a couple of other assistant professors at GALCIT to test high-strain rate behavior of alloys under shear-dominant loading. For the life of her she cannot figure out why the test results keep skewing completely off-center, which is why she's scribbling on the back of her phone bill as she climbs the stairs. She doesn't notice Sheldon for a good page and a half, and then she looks up and realizes she's standing in the middle of the flight. Sheldon is two steps below her and studying her (rather flowery) equations intently.
"Sorry," she says, and makes to move out of the way, but he snatches the pencil out of her hand, crosses out three of her variables and substitutes something else, scribbles an answer in cramped block letters and just like that, bam. Magic answer.
"How did you—?" She's maybe a little bit dumbfounded. Waiter. Advancing modeling and mathematics. Waiter. Something here is not adding up.
He opens his mouth to explain, shuts it, and that's the point that she overbalances. For a minute she teeters on the edge of the stair; then her heel slips and she goes careening backwards, arms flailing—
Sheldon catches her neatly, one arm around her waist and another braced on the handrail. She clips him just under the chin with one open hand.
"Ow!" he yelps, and then, "I bruise very easily, you know!"
*
Three months later, curled naked in his bed (in his arms), she finally asks him the question that's been nagging her all along.
"So, sweetie," she says, "what's a genius like you doing in a place like this?"
The one where they wake up with a telepathic link.
"Penny, you're in my brain. You can't be in my brain!"
More importantly, isn't her head going to, like, explode or something?
"Your head is not going to explode—"
"You didn't think we were going to wake up with a friggin' mind-meld, either!"
Sheldon's face wrinkles, but beneath about a hundred other layers of thought she feels a warm wash of pleasure that she knows what a mind-meld is, and that definitely isn't coming from her. Neither are ninety-eight of the other thoughts. Ninety-eight is two times seven squared, the tenth Wedderburn-Etherington number, a nontotient, the atomic number of californium (an actinide, produced by neutron capture on berkelium-249)—
"Can't you turn it off?"
"What do you mean, 'turn it off?' I can't 'turn it off,' I don't know how we turned it on!"
"Okay, just—" She falls back on his head, snatches a pillow, and wraps it over her face. Think think think, she tells herself, but it's difficult when there's a steady stream of Is she smothering herself, I don't understand the appropriate protocol for this situation (does this mean I'm telepathic like Professor X?), she's touching my/your pillow touching the pillow touching the pillow, what if there are dust mites (there aren't dust mites) will she like me if the pillow has dust mites (???) dust mites (Dermatophagoides farinae, by which of course I refer to the American dust mite)—
Penny takes a deep breath, holds it for a count of ten, and lets it out. Then she gathers her determination and begins to sing to herself, slowly and deliberately: "We all live in a yellow submarine, a yellow submarine—"
We don't live in a yellow submarine, that's patently ridiculous, we live (home/4A/34° 9' 22" N 118° 7' 5" W/across from Penny/Pasadena/California/America/Earth/ZZ9 Plural Z Alpha)—what were they thinking? Eoin Colfer?
"WE ALL LIVE IN A YELLOW SUBMARINE—"
The typeset is different, the first page alone contains a sentence fragment—surely a meticulous editor would have—
"A YELLOW SUBMARINE—"
#FFFF00 (that's not her hair, I dislike such an arbitrary descriptive as 'yellow')—
"A YELLOW SUBMARINE!"
And—
Silence.
Penny stops trying to smother herself with the pillow.