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The Rum Tum Tugger is a curious beast:
His disobliging ways are a matter of habit.
If you offer him fish then he always wants a feast;
When there isn't any fish then he won't eat rabbit.
If you offer him cream then he sniffs and sneers,
For he only likes what he finds for himself.
Sheldon Cooper awoke one morning to find he had been turned into a cat.
His initial thought was that he was experiencing a lucid dream. If he concentrated, he felt certain that he could manipulate the scenario in his favor, perhaps trading the tail and paws and frankly superior eyesight for a stage in Sweden and Leonard Nimoy handing him the Nobel while George Smoot and Stan Lee looked on in envy. Unfortunately, his feline state persisted. Perhaps if he tried LaBerge's mnemonic induction of lucid dreams operation, or the cycle adjustment technique—those would take several days to properly implement, but there was an appeal to the ability to control his mind even while asleep—
He opened his eyes and continued to be a cat.
Four paws, yes, still the seal-brown tail, eyesight several degrees superior to that of Homo novus, and a whole new sensory input that seemed to emanate from the vicinity of his whiskers. Sheldon stretched and then leaped down from his bed, taking care not to snag his claws in the bedding.
Remain calm, he told himself. Apply the scientific method. Observation: I am a cat, while yesterday I recall being a human. Memory tampering? Have I always been a cat? Psychosomatic break? Alien technology? Am I now an Animorph?
For several moments he focused on his human body without success. Neither did his attempts at thought-speak prove fruitful.
Was he, in fact, still human, but merely hallucinating the experience of being an animal? His room wasn't equipped with a mirror, although Penny had pointed out several times that he would benefit from looking at his full-length reflection before leaving for a conference. That had been shortly before she attacked his best plaid suit with a pair of scissors.
No mirror. He'd have to get to the bathroom, or (preferably?) Penny's apartment.
The door was closed, the doorknob now several feet above his head.
He was a cat.
Sheldon threw back his head and yowled.
-
"You're sure that's Sheldon?"
Penny rolled her eyes. "Yes, Leonard, I think I recognize my own boyfriend."
"Penny, he's a cat," Leonard said. "A cat. Small and furry and also a cat."
Sheldon, perched primly on one of the kitchen barstools, stared at Leonard in a manner intended to be unnerving.
"Look, Leonard, see?" Penny said. "How is that not Sheldon? He's glaring at you."
"But he's a cat," Leonard protested—rather uselessly, Sheldon thought, but Leonard was useless in most emergency situations. Very privately, Sheldon was willing to entertain the notion that he would be panicking himself if he hadn't drawn up a preparedness plan for everything from the Soup Garden closing unexpectedly to armadas of giant squid rising from the sea and conquering France.
"He's a handsome boy, isn't he though," Penny cooed, although she'd signed a contract stated that she would not engage in pet names (ha! a pun; additionally, did this in fact fall under pet names? Flirting? Some other subsection?) outside of the bedroom. Sheldon growled in disapproval.
"Huh," Penny said. "That's the same sound he made after I shot his cushion with the paint gun."
In the ultimate expression of disdain, Sheldon turned away from her and began to clean behind his ear with one paw.
"And he's still self-cleaning, too!" Well. She didn't have to sound so delighted.
"He's a cat," Leonard repeated.
Penny sighed. "Sheldon," she said, "I'm going to pick you up now. That okay?"
Very deliberately, Sheldon began to lick his belly.
"Your alternative is to stay here with Leonard," Penny added.
He knocked the stool over in his haste to leap to her shoulder.
-
She carried him in the crook of her arm to her bathroom vanity and set him on the counter. "There you go, sweetie," she said. "I think you're some kind of Siamese. Pretty boy," she cooed again. He slitted his eyes and hissed.
"Okay, geez, sorry. Is it my fault you're good looking even when you aren't human?" She flipped her hair over her shoulder, and Sheldon resisted the urge to bat at the long tendrils.
She was, however, correct; he did make a fine specimen of a cat, with blue eyes a tad paler than usual and a sleek, creamy coat. The back of his mind kept insisting that the cat in the mirror was not his reflection, but a different creature all together. Interesting.
"Well, tiger?" Penny said. "Satisfied?"
He butted his head against her and jumped to the floor. It was a shame there was no Nobel Prize in Veterinary Science, although typing the actual dissertation would be difficult without fingers.
-
"There," Penny said, situating the pot of paint beside him on the table. "I though you could, you know, dip your little claws in the paint and write out what you wanted."
Sheldon studied the hot-pink paint and the paper she'd laid out in front of him—it looked like the backside of a script for The Cherry Orchard—and then, tentatively, extended his claws and dipped them in the paint. He misjudged the distance, though, and stuck his whole paw in by accident. The sensation was intolerable, and he yowled and shook his foot, slinging paint everywhere.
"Oh, honey," Penny sighed, and scooped him up by the armpits. "C'mere. We'll wash you off in the sink."
-
"I swear, Sheldon, that milk is only two days past the expiration and it wasn't even open."
-
And later: "Are you stalking my Penny Blossom?"
-
Being a cat, Sheldon concluded, was exhausting.
"Here, kitty-Sheldon," Penny said, after she'd brushed her teeth—she'd steadfastly ignored his own pointed gesticulation toward the toothbrush, he assumed because she had no intention of cleaning a cat's teeth—"You can sleep with me tonight. Maybe you'll be better in the morning?"
Sheldon hoped so. Leonard certainly couldn't be counted on to come up with a solution, and Penny, level-headed as she was, lacked the scientific know-how to reverse whatever event had transformed him in the first place. He followed at her heels into the bedroom, and, once she'd crawled under the covers, curled into her side. It wasn't the first night he'd spent naked in her bedroom, and as a cat he appreciated the warmth of her body more than ever.
In the darkness, Penny set her hand on his head and began to rub small, gentle circles over his skull. Sheldon felt the low rumble grow in his chest, and, unable to contain himself, began to purr.
Penny's fingers stilled for a moment, then resumed their caress. "I won't tell anyone," she whispered, and he purred louder in gratitude.
-
Sometime during the night, he woke to find he was again himself. Five fingers, five toes, the usual amount of hair and no disquieting urge to clean Penny's feet with his tongue. He almost missed the whiskers, but opposable thumbs seemed like worthy compensation.
Content, he curled around Penny and went back to sleep.