The Inefficiency Postulate: Or the Long Way Around
Disclaimer: TBBT does not belong to me. This is merely my playground.
Summary: When Amy learns her desires are incompatible with Sheldon's, she has a decision to make. As the Bard says, the course of true love never did run smooth.
Amy was glad once more for her very warm and very conservative mode of dress as she hurried back to her lab from her meeting across campus on the unusually chilly California day. An unfamiliar sound caused her to stop her hurried pace. Her head slowly turned to the squeals of children playing. They did not seem bothered by the crisp air.
A recently-developed clenching in her gut took place at the sight of the children. Before Penny, she would have tried to diagnose herself with a medical condition at the feeling rather than admit it was her emotions, not her physical well-being, that was the cause. Then again, before she met Penny she likely would never have been able to experience such feelings.
Longing. It was a feeling Amy was well acquainted with. It came on to her slowly as she became friends with, and then the girlfriend of, Sheldon Cooper. Longing for him, his mind, his touch, his intoxicating scent of talc.
This particular longing that she felt was not about Sheldon Cooper. Not directly at least. She'd assumed she'd have children one day. She'd never given it much thought, and certainly not the same single-minded effort she put into her work. But then she'd gone to the coffee shop, met Sheldon Cooper, been introduced to Penny and Bernadette, and things started to change. She underwent her adolescence, so to speak, and emerged a different woman—a woman the Sheldon Cooper of their first meeting would never have looked at twice. She knew the longing for what it was. She was nearing thirty five and it was time for her to have children. If she did not get started soon, she would not be able to have children for much longer, at least not without incurring significant health risks to both herself and the baby. As it was her fertility was already on the decline.
And that was the rub. In the end, it came back to Sheldon Cooper. Her boyfriend who could barely stand to hold her hands and kiss her, which he did solely because he was obligated to by the relationship agreement, and who certainly had no interest in engaging in coitus, his word not hers, with her.
It was time for Amy to face the inevitable. She had to talk to Sheldon. That was the strength of their relationship, their ability to talk about anything and everything, and move beyond it. It was why they were close, friends before they were . . . well, not lovers. It was already the second Tuesday of the month. Date night was coming up in two days and she would broach the subject then.
Shaking her mind of the longing, she continued on her way back to her lab. A quick glance at her phone told her that the boys would have already eaten their lunch and she would be better off eating her lunch in her lab as she read some recent publications than going to the cafeteria alone.
Her cold chicken sandwich and an apple were sufficient caloric intake, but as she pulled them out of the office fridge she knew that was not what she really wanted to eat. The truth was, she hated eating alone. Ever since she was a child she'd eaten alone. Then she met Sheldon and Penny, and perhaps not seamlessly, she wiggled her way into their friend group and she no longer had to eat alone. Lunch was spent in the cafeteria with her colleagues and later on her friends, and dinner usually at 4A, the Cheesecake Factory, or on date night. She associated eating alone with undesirable times in her life. The neurobiologist in her should be analyzing exactly what those thoughts meant and coming up with a way to overcome them, but the lonely woman in her took over and settled down to a quiet lunch spent reading by herself.
She was surprised when not two minutes later she heard a familiar knock at her lab door. "Amy...Amy...Amy," her boyfriend called out.
"Come in," she returned and looked towards the door as Sheldon stepped inside. With him came the feeling of warmth and belonging, his cocky confidence flooding the room with him as if it was exactly where he belonged. Amy long ago noticed that any room with Sheldon Cooper in it felt like that.
"What can I do for you, Sheldon?" she asked, her thoughts from before still too raw for her to muster up any enthusiasm for the question. She was weary. Tired; Tired of fighting Sheldon for the physical intimacy she craved; Tired of waiting; Tired of returning home every night to her apartment alone instead of the house she would undoubtedly share with her husband and children, should they come into existence.
In a typical Sheldon manner, he entirely missed her dejection and went straight into a rant about his problems, namely Amy did not show up in the cafeteria for lunch and she always at with the guys on Tuesday.
"...were supposed to be there...had to put up with Raj's...Kripke...schedule—"
"—I'm not in the mood for this right now, Sheldon." Amy eventually held her hand up to silence him.
Sheldon took on that look of a surprised child after being abruptly cut off. Taken aback, he said, "Oh."
Amy could see the slight shift in his eye that indicated he was thinking. Calculating something. She also saw when his calculations failed as he went from upset at her to confused. She knew she could not put up with a boyfriend any less intelligent than her, but sometimes Sheldon's very intelligence was difficult as he became caught up in his own problems and failed to recognize or understand hers.
"I had a meeting across campus and wasn't able to make it back to the cafeteria in time. I'm sorry," Amy said, not wanting to fight with him. Date night was coming up and she did not want to give her flighty boyfriend any excuse to cancel.
"I see," Sheldon said, and then, because the information still did not compute, he said, "but why aren't you 'in the mood'? Did your meeting not go well?"
Oh Sheldon. She loved him yet he could be daft sometimes. Strike that. Her intelligent boyfriend was daft most of the time when it came to things that couldn't be measured and calculated.
"My meeting went fine, thank you for asking." The social niceties now came as second nature to her. She could not deny that Penny and Bernadette changed her for the better, and the social courtesies she once did not practice were one of the many ways she'd grown over the years.
Sheldon fell silent. With nothing to say, Amy continued eating her sandwich though she did not return her attention to the paper. It remained focused on Sheldon standing tall and confident in her neurobiology lab. She wondered how much she would freak if she told him that he was standing only two feet away from a brain she was about to prep for dissection. Their silences were as comfortable as their conversations. In fact, their ability to be in the same room together without saying a word was as integral to their relationship as their friendship. It was comfortable.
"Is there a particular reason you came here?" Amy asked. Sheldon seldom visited her in her lab, and usually only when he wanted her to take him home from work when he wanted to leave early and Leonard refused to take him until the end of the day.
"No," Sheldon said, and he appeared as if there was more he was about to say before he clamped his jaw shut and redirected the topic. "I mean yes. I came here to inquire the reason for your absence today at lunch. Now that issue is resolved, I will go. Goodbye, Dr Fowler."
"Goodbye, Dr Cooper," Amy said to the physicist's retreating back.
That was odd, she thought once he left. Sheldon seemed to be acting a bit out of sorts when he burst into her lab, and she had to wonder why he came to see her personally, making the long trek from the physics department to the biology department just to account for her absence at lunch when he would be seeing her at dinner with their friends that evening.
There was one thing Amy knew and it was that Sheldon Cooper was an enigma.
AN: This is the longer story I spoke about earlier. The draft is now complete at over 300 pages. I'll be editing and posting at least every Monday, Wednesday, Friday. If I have the time and encouragement (**cough cough reviews**), I'll probably edit and post faster. For anyone who dislikes slow updates or unfinished stories, no worries here. Long and angsty, but there will be a HEA for Shamy shippers.