The Valium Confession

By Laura Schiller

Based on: The Big Bang Theory

Copyright: Chuck Lorre & Bill Prady

/

Leonard eyed the skinny, sleepy-eyed figure of his roommate with increasing bewilderment. Sheldon was an even stranger sight than usual; he had folded himself sideways into an armchair, his long legs dangling down one side, his head slumped into the cushion, and he couldn't stop talking. Mrs. Wolowitz's Valium had certainly done a number on him. (Leonard reminded himself to have a serious talk with Howard the next time they met; drugging someone without their knowledge was not okay, no matter how annoying they might be.)

The question was why Sheldon couldn't sleep, even with the Valium in his system. Something about this whole situation bothered Leonard in a way he couldn't put his finger on.

"Seriously, Sheldon?" he asked. "All this because Penny told you she didn't finish community college?"

"Penny … " Sheldon frowned. "She made me promise not to tell."

"Yeah, you said so already."

"I broke my promise, didn't I?"

"So?" asked Leonard, vaguely irritated. "It's not that big of a deal. We've kept things from her before for her own good, haven't we? Like how she can't sing."

He still winced at the memory of how shrill Penny's otherwise pleasant voice could get. Sheldon had not only invented a drug-addicted cousin as an excuse to avoid hearing Penny perform, he had actually hired an actor to play said drug-addicted cousin, and done it all without batting an eye, let alone losing sleep.

"You never reacted like this before, so why now?"

"That was different," Sheldon muttered into the cushion.

"How?"

"She wasn't my friend then."

Leonard's jaw dropped.

In the two years he had lived with Sheldon, he had never heard the younger man refer to anyone as his friend, except for himself, Raj and Howard, and even then he tended to use the word as if it were a job title. Never as casually as this – and definitely never referring to a woman.

Leonard remembered several moments he'd been trying very hard to forget: Sheldon standing tall and smiling when Penny called his mind 'beautiful' the first time they met; Sheldon calling her "attractive" on Halo Night, when he normally couldn't care less what a woman looked like; Penny taking care of Sheldon when he was sick; Penny's disappointed face when she came to a restaurant expecting all four of them and found only Leonard.

However much Sheldon might deny it, there was an informational back channel between him and Penny. The lie about community college proved it. She had told Sheldon something she wouldn't tell Leonard. She trusted Sheldon more.

"Sheldon, be honest. Is there something going on between you and Penny?"

"That's an awfully vague question," was Sheldon's maddening response. "You'll have to narrow it down."

"Are you in love with her?" Leonard snapped, sounding sharper than he meant to, and feeling ashamed as soon as the words came out. He knew he sounded petty, childish, unreasonable; he hated feeling like this, but he couldn't seem to help it. Something about Penny made him thirteen years old again. How many girls back then had made him feel like a loser? Didn't he deserve to win just once?

Sheldon unfolded himself from the armchair and stood up, swaying a little, but still looking more formidable than someone in green plaid pajamas had any right to look. "Am I in love with her?" he repeated, in tones of absolute contempt.

"Sorry," said Leonard, breathing a quiet sigh of relief. "Right, of course you're not."

"I have dedicated my life to the pursuit of pure knowledge and the suppression of my baser urges," Sheldon went on, his sharp voice seeming to fill the entire room, sounding more and more Southern the longer he spoke. "If you had any idea how difficult that is, you wouldn't ask me such a ridiculous question. If you think my heart rate doesn't accelerate whenever we touch, if you think I don't notice that grin on her face when she wins at Halo 3, if you think I wasn't tempted to give that Neanderthal Kurt a piece of my mind, then you, sir, are sadly mistaken!"

He backed Leonard across the room as he spoke until Leonard's butt hit the kitchenette counter, then punctuated the word mistaken with a poke in the chest.

"Unlike you, however, I don't allow my hindbrain to make decisions for me. So no, Leonard, for your information, I am not in love with Penny. I work really damn hard at not being in love with Penny. Am I makin' myself clear?"

Leonard's heart sank into his bedsocks. He found himself wishing that Valium had never been invented, that Mrs. Wolowitz were in better health, or at least that Howard had more sense than to put the stuff in Sheldon's milk. But there was no use blaming the Valium for something that had been happening for months.

Sheldon was in love. Knowing him, probably for the first time in his life. No wonder he couldn't sleep.

"My God, Sheldon," said Leonard, suddenly torn between jealousy and compassion. "Why didn't you say anything before?"

"How could I, when you wanted her so badly?" Sheldon seemed to have exhausted himself with that outburst; he sank back, this time into his usual spot on the couch, slumping bonelessly into the rainbow-striped pillow. "But, Leonard … one thing I still don't understand."

"What?"

"Why would she lie to you about her academic credentials? Or lack thereof?"

Trust Sheldon to always find the sorest spot in any conversation. Leonard, who had been asking himself the same question, squirmed internally as he sat down in the same armchair Sheldon had vacated earlier.

"Maybe it's a good sign," he said, with an optimism that rang false in his own ears. "It shows that she cares what I … what we think of her. Maybe we're challenging her to aspire to a higher intellectual level. That's a good thing, right?"

He had pleasant visions of Penny in graduation robes, a tassel on her cap swinging as she launched herself into his arms. She'd outgrow her dreams of being an actress, get a job in a nice clean office, come home smelling like ink and paper instead of deep-frying oil, earn enough for them to get married and buy a house in the suburbs, where they could raise smart and beautiful children …

Those visions fell apart, however, when he remembered Penny in her leopard-print jacket, getting ready for the RENT showcase. She had been so proud that night. Leonard had his doubts that an office job would make her face light up the same way.

"Or maybe," Sheldon retorted coldly, "You made her feel stupid."

"What, me?" Leonard yelped. "Sheldon, you make everyone feel stupid!"

"Of course I do." Sheldon waved the criticism away with one long, languid hand. "Everyone is, compared to me. But Penny … " He trailed off, lost for words, and that more than anything convinced Leonard that his roommate really was in love.

"Penny is … Penny," Sheldon said. "She can kick my you-know-what at Halo, fix her own furniture and sense other people's emotions. You can no more measure her intelligence by conventional means than you should judge the Hedron Collider on its usefulness as a toaster."

The Hedron Collider. Had he seriously just compared their pretty neighbor to one of the most complex, beautiful and world-changing creations in the history of physics? It made a strange kind of sense, though. Everything else about Sheldon's personality was larger than life; when he fell in love, why wouldn't his love be the same? Raj and Howard were attracted to Penny too, but Leonard doubted their feelings were anything close to this.

"I've never thought Penny was stupid," Leonard said humbly. "I didn't mean to make her feel that way. And … Sheldon?"

"Hmm?"

Leonard stood up, smoothed his bathrobe, and cleared his throat. What he did next would be one of the hardest things he had ever done. Since he was a teenager, people had been calling him "a nice guy", and he had clung to that definition as the only source of confidence he had. Now was the time to prove he deserved that title.

A nice guy wouldn't make a girl feel insecure. A nice guy wouldn't resent her for not returning his feelings. A nice guy wouldn't stand in the way of his friend.

If Sheldon could manage all that, then damn it, so could he.

"I think," said Leonard, "If any of us four has a chance with her, it's probably you."

Sheldon's eyes flew open. He looked as if someone had just presented him with a whole new branch of string theory. But before he could start to pepper Leonard with questions, the smaller man turned tail and fled to his room.

He had only so much niceness left tonight.

/

"Penny, you're in my spot."

"C'mon, Sheldon, just this once?"

It was Chinese Food Night and the five of them were sitting around the coffee table, digging into their takeout boxes and listening to a by-now familiar argument. Penny sat with her bare feet tucked under her and her back against the rainbow-striped pillow, smiling up at Sheldon as he leaned increasingly close to her. Leonard noticed that there were actually five different dishes on the table; Sheldon had predicted her showing up to "steal" the food within a quarter of an hour, and he hadn't even complained about the odd number of people versus the even number of dumplings.

"If you keep sitting there, that spot will acquire a permanent odor of green apple shampoo."

"Wha - ? Okay, I'm not even gonna ask how you know what my hair smells like."

"I know because I am a highly evolved human being with superior senses. I cannot concentrate on my Halo campaign if I feel like I'm walking through Meemaw's garden."

"Oh yeah?" Penny smirked, pulled the scrunchie out of her hair, and deliberately shook it loose all over the cushion. "What'cha gonna do about it?"

"I propose a compromise."

Raj gasped. Howard snorted. Leonard kept his head down and concentrated very hard on wielding his chopsticks, a challenge at the best of times, in order to ignore what was happening.

Sheldon's idea of a compromise, evidently, was to scoop Penny up off the couch, sit down in the disputed spot, and deposit her in his lap. "There! Now your hair is off the pillow and we can both occupy the couch section of our choice."

Being Sheldon, of course he was clumsy about it, and being Penny, she let out a high-pitched squeak of surprise that made all four men wince. But once she was settled, instead of awkwardly moving away (as she would have done with Leonard or Raj) or throwing a punch (as she would have done with Howard), she leaned back against Sheldon's chest with the expression of a cat that got the cream.

"Yeah," she said. "That works."

"But if my extremities go numb, you really will have to sit somewhere else."

"Don't worry, sweetie." She patted the arm he was using to hold her steady. "I'll watch out for your extremities, believe me."

Raj clutched Howard's arm and whispered something urgently into his ear. Howard opened his mouth to translate, but Leonard made a knife-across-the throat gesture with one chopstick just in time. For once, they actually deferred to him and left the subject alone – at least while Penny and Sheldon were in the room – and really, it was surprising how little difference it made.

While Howard made a blatantly obvious attempt to change the subject ("Sooo, how about that new Fantastic Four movie? Is Jessica Alba hot or what?"), Leonard surreptitiously pulled his phone out from the pocket of his gray hoodie.

He still had Leslie Winkle's number in there, and the last time they met, she had outright told him that she was available. There was something very refreshing about her honesty; not to mention how pretty she looked when swaying to the rhythm of her violin. And who knew? Maybe once they got to know each other better, she'd become less abrasive and he'd become more confident, and they'd discover they were right for each other after all …

Okay, so he wanted a rebound. He really had to stop lying, especially to himself. It was a pervasive habit that would get him in trouble one of these days.

God, he hated it when his conscience started sounding like his mother.