SO, let's try this again. The first time I tried uploading this story my computer decided to be difficult, so hopefully this one will work better. thanks to everyone who messaged me to inform me of the technical difficulties.
Anyways, this is an old(ish) tumblr fic that I've decided to upload here. Don't own TBBT, you know the drill. Enjoy!
The gang was all together, having their usual weekly meal at 2311 Los Robles Avenue, Apartment 4A. Except it wasn't the usual, and it hadn't been for months; any and all forms of conversation have been focused dependably onto one lone subject, and Sheldon was officially, royally sick of it.
"So Amy, how'd the cake tasting for the wedding go?" Bernadette piped up.
The woman beside him positively shone, and for a moment Sheldon reconsidered his stance on the nonstop nuptial talk if it made her smile that dazzling. Just a moment.
"Great! We decided on French Vanilla with a chocolate filling, and it took less than thirty minutes to reach a consensus." She shot that stunning smile his way, and his fork came to a startling halt just before his lips. "Never been so thankful for such a persnickety fiancee."
Sheldon scoffed as his fork went back to completing its journey, but the swipe of his thumb over her knuckles silently told her otherwise.
Ever since the engagement, Sheldon had made the conscious decision to be more affectionate with Amy than ever before. In public places, the occasional touch to the arm or brush of the hip. With their friends, handholding was now such a common occurrence that Howard had long since grown bored of teasing them about it. And in private… well, Sheldon wasn't one to kiss and tell, but there most certainly was kissing. Among other things.
Raj frowned. "But I thought you wanted red velvet? You showed me the bridal magazines of the design you wanted and everything."
"Because I can't stand even the sight of red velvet cake," Sheldon intervened despite his persistent objection to the subject matter. "It's simply chocolate posing as some sort of crimson, edible luxury item."
Leonard carefully set his plate down before he spoke. "Buddy, let me explain something to you. The invitations might have both your names on it, but it's not your wedding. It's hers."
Sheldon's nose wrinkled, obviously perplexed. "Leonard, that makes absolutely no logical sense. Is Penny married to you, but you aren't to her? Though judging by the way she drools over those magazines that list the top pectoral muscles of male celebrities, I would assume the opposite to be true."
The former waitress in question had to take a moment to visualize a non-personalized pen and let it go. It didn't work. "Now you listen to me-"
"Penny, it's fine," Amy interrupted. All eyes turned to her. "If there's anything we've learned these past four years as a couple, it's how to compromise. I agreed to let him pick the flavor of cake, he agreed not to have the entire ceremony performed in Klingon."
"Only the vows," Sheldon clarified with a stately nod.
"But what about your special day?" Bernadette asked.
Amy shrugged. "That's love. Meeting halfway." And with that, the conversation was over.
But Sheldon didn't even have time to breathe a sigh of relief when it became clear that talk was still refusing to stray from the upcoming wedding bells. Honestly, they were just two people finally deciding to promise their undying love and commitment to one another in the presence of family, friends and, according to his mother at least, an Almighty Creator. What was the big deal?
"Just remember to keep a paper bag handy in your dressing room, Ames," Penny was saying. "I was so nervous I thought I was gonna puke."
"Really? I thought you had that for your raging hangover from your bachelorette party," Howard joked.
Bernadette wisely chose to veer course away from the uncomfortable topic to save her friend from having to decide between her two loves, Leonard and alcohol. She didn't want to hurt Leonard's feelings. "I had butterflies before my wedding, too. It also didn't help that my dad was going on about how lengthy and difficult it is to obtain an annulment from the Church."
"Wow," Penny said with a laugh. "My dad practically shoved me down the aisle before I had the chance to change my mind."
No one noticed Sheldon jolt ever so slightly in his seat and turn a worried look to Amy, who had gone still as death, only listening.
"Did he blame his watery eyes on allergies when he first saw you in your dress?" Penny continued.
"Mine blamed Obamacare, but close enough," Bernie replied. "And then, of course, the obligatory comment…"
"Uh huh," Penny nodded.
They said it together: "You're just as beautiful as your mother was on our wedding day."
By then, Leonard too had caught on to Amy and her unnaturally tight hold on her glass of water, trembling in her grip as her gaze seared a hole into the floor, and attempted to signal Penny, but she was too busy giggling with Bernadette to notice.
"To be honest, that walk down the aisle was probably the longest thirty seconds of my life. But when Dad kissed me and let me go, it felt way too short," said Bernie.
"Yeah," Penny replied, deep in thought. "Funny how life is. You get annoyed with your dad for not letting you take the car or not liking your boyfriend, but once he gives you away… it's like you're not really his anymore." She sighed. "Guess you never know what you have until it's gone."
"Excuse me," Amy said suddenly, startling everyone as she leapt to her feet and all but fled the room. It took several long moments of the most piercing quiet, the two blonde women piecing together the discussion they just had with their friend's nearly tearful face, for realization to dawn at last.
"Oh no…" Penny whispered. She made to get up, but was surprisingly stayed by one lanky, t-shirt clad limb.
"I'll go," Sheldon said gently. He wanted to be angry with them, but he knew the girls hadn't meant to hurt Amy. Even so, a subject delicate as this was not the job of the bestie to handle. It was the fiancee's.
He found her just outside of his bedroom, back against the wall and slumped to the floor as if she had been physically unable to take another step. She held her knees to her chest, forehead resting against them, crying quietly but heavily, unceasingly.
He's said before how much he detested weeping, and Sheldon was immensely grateful that Amy rarely did so, but this also meant that he lacked in experience on what to do. What does one say at a time like this? He was one of the most intelligent men in the world, armed with a vocabulary that rivaled the Oxford English Dictionary, and yet even he couldn't come up with the right words to make this okay again.
Then again, maybe he didn't need to.
Sheldon walked with purpose towards the love of his life and, after sinking down beside her, pulled her into his arms. He allowed her to sob into his shirt despite the mess, all the while stroking her smooth hair and not uttering a word.
Time passed and so did the tears, but Sheldon still didn't let up in his care. Eventually Amy's head ended up in the crook of his neck, his chin resting on her head as he fidgeted with her glasses folded up in his hand. He couldn't even remember at what point he removed them.
"My father's name was Joseph Reginald Farrah," Amy said out of nowhere, startling Sheldon. "He and my mother dated all through college. They were inseparable, perfectly matched, like they had come straight out a romance novel. Everyone was sure that they'd be together forever."
As always when he learned something new, a million and one questions swirled about inside Sheldon's head, yet still he remained silent. He waited for Amy to supply the missing pieces herself.
"He was a year older than my mother, a chemistry major, and when he graduated at the top of his class he was immediately offered this great job as a researcher at Harvard. But he couldn't stand the thought of leaving my mother in Illinois, so he found one locally instead." She drew in a shaky breath, and Sheldon briefly feared she would tear up again. "When my mom got her journalism degree, she was offered an internship for the LA Times and… she took it."
Setting her glasses down in his lap, Sheldon reached to wrap his other arm around her and pull her just a tad closer.
"She called it the messiest breakup since Henry VIII," Amy recalled with a dim smile. "Shouting, crying, throwing things, the works, but Mom wouldn't budge. Three weeks after moving to California, she discovered she was pregnant." She hurriedly swiped a hand beneath her eyes. "She never told him."
Sheldon wasn't entirely sure how to process all this new data. The only time Amy had ever mentioned her father previously was when the two had been discussing their families, way back when their friendship had barely progressed past texting only. All she had said on the matter was that she had never known her father, and Sheldon, noticing the tiniest crack in her robotic, emotionless shell, had been quick to let the matter drop.
"I'm sorry, Amy," was all he could think of to tell her, because honestly, what else was there to say?
"Don't be. It was all for the best." Glancing up at him, Amy gave the first semblance of a true smile since this whole mess had been brought up. "If she hadn't done that, I never would have met you."
Sheldon smiled back, the hand on her shoulder trailing down to tangle with her own, and he lifted them both up momentarily to admire the engagement ring sitting on her fourth finger.
It was small, but what made it truly unique was that it was designed to look like an atom, with the diamond as the nucleus and a series of small silver bands surrounding it, one of the few common links between their two branches of science. Penny had thought it was tacky, but Amy loved it and that was all that mattered. It may have cost a fortune, but if he was willing to buy a tiara when asking for her forgiveness, he figured he ought to go all out when asking for her hand.
"Would you like to see a picture?" Amy asked. When Sheldon nodded, she dug into her pocket to pull out her phone, quickly swiping through until she found it and showed him. It was an old photo of him with a young and beautiful Ms. Fowler, at some restaurant by the looks of it, his arm around her in a similar way to how Sheldon's was around Amy's at that moment. A graduation cap was perched lopsidedly upon her mother's red hair, and both were beaming widely.
"This was just before they split," Amy said softly, tracing the outline of her father's face. "Neither of them knew it then, but this was the only family photo we were ever going to get."
Sheldon's eyes widened at the implication, leaning in to look closer at Ms. Fowler's middle where the beginnings of the remarkable woman beside him was taking place. Then his eyes shifted to study the face of Joseph Farrah. The resemblance between him and his daughter was uncanny.
"Amy." Sheldon pulled back just far enough to look at her full in the face. "Do you want someone to walk you down the aisle? We could get Leonard or Howard-"
"No, it wouldn't feel right," she said instantly. She sighed deeply, then turned to look at him with a weak smile on her lips, the light gone from her eyes once again. "I was alone my whole life before I met you. I can endure one more day."
X
Sheldon Cooper stood sweating before supposed God and man, fidgeting with the simple silver band between his fingers. He had always considered himself a confident man, almost exclusively to a fault as his friends would oft tell him, yet somehow the thought of officially pledging himself to his perfect woman in marriage made him want to run for the hills.
Well, that wasn't exactly true. He was just as certain that he wanted to marry Amy as the day he got down on one knee, germs be damned. What he was terrified of was the notion that Amy could be having second thoughts. An absurd thought, he knew; he was a delightful person to be around, and the two of them were better matched than anyone he'd ever seen. And yet, thinking back on all the mistakes he'd made through the course of their relationship, he couldn't help but doubt if he really and truly deserved her.
He was so busy having an inner panic attack, he didn't even realize that the ceremony had already begun. Before he could blink the entire bridal party was beside him at the foot of the altar: Leonard, Howard, Raj and George to his left, Penny, Bernadette, Emily and Missy to his right. He felt a small pat on the arm, and turned to receive an encouraging smile from his homunculus of a best man. He felt the knot in the pit of his stomach loosen, but only just.
And then, without any warning or chance to prepare himself, the double doors opened.
It was like his brain had short-circuited; everything else around him went fuzzy, frozen in place like a faulty computer screen, but Sheldon didn't even care. All that mattered was that the image of his bride slowly making her way to him was sharp as ever, high definition Amy. Everything else was irrelevant.
His mind processed and calibrated every aspect of her appearance at hyper speed: her dress, simple and modest with light beading and small flower designs, all the way to her sheer cap sleeves; her bouquet, white roses hanging within an array of green that Sheldon instantly recognized as styled after Jane Hawking's, wife of his friend and lifelong hero Stephen; her hair, curled and pulled back to show off her face smiling shy but bright; and her veil, flowing elegantly down the expanse of her back as it stemmed from her glittering tiara.
She was so beautiful, but something wasn't quite right. As she watched him watching her walk down the aisle, ever so slowly drawing closer and closer, she looked so… alone.
I was alone my whole life before I met you.
Before I met you.
Sheldon couldn't take it anymore. He charged down the aisle at full speed, ignoring the collective gasps and whispers and Amy stopping dead in her tracks, exactly midway between the entrance and altar. It took several moments for him to register that everyone thought he was running away again, but no. He was running, all right, but not away. Never away from her, ever again.
When he finally reached her, she barely had time to open her mouth to ask a question before he grabbed both sides of her face and kissed her. He didn't care who saw or what they thought, only that he couldn't stand the thought of her being alone for a second more of the life she had left. He was going to make up for all those lost years, between her friendless childhood and missing father and all that time he had wasted being afraid of the extent of his feelings for this amazing, extraordinary woman who, when he had pulled out that ring and said the four most terrifying words of his life, had been just insane enough to say yes.
And, well, if he had over thirty years worth of lonesomeness to make up for, he might as well start now.
He released her lips, but not her face as he looked down at his Amy with eyes lidded. She still looked slightly stunned but was also smiling, those gorgeous green eyes shining brightly. "You're a little early."
Sheldon grinned. "I think you know more than most that I am not a patient man." He pulled away fully, but didn't stray far as he took her hand and placed it in the crook of his elbow.
"Sheldon," she asked, her breath hitching. "What are you doing?"
Using his free hand to grasp her own, Sheldon leaned down to whisper in her ear. "Meeting halfway."
And with that they both faced forward and processed down the aisle together, as equals, friends, lovers, and by the day's end, spouses. She was his everything, just as he knew he was hers.
All their friends were facing them at the foot of the altar, not a single one with a dry eye. A choked sob was heard from behind them, which Sheldon instantly recognized as belonging to his mother. But all he had eyes for was the finish line, the altar where they were at last to become man and wife.
The poor minister appeared unsure of how to proceed, the man before him acting as both father and groom. Finally, he cleared his throat and began with, "Uh, who gives this woman to be married to… this man?"
"She gives herself away," Sheldon answered immediately. He then turned his head to stare deep into his bride's eyes, who for her part looked as though she couldn't tear her gaze from his if she tried. "I'm just the man lucky enough to receive her."
The rest of the wedding went by in a blur, the sitting through of the excruciatingly dull readings and sermons, the nervous fumbling of rings slipping onto fingers, the unhesitating and crystal clear pronouncements of the "I do's" in flawless Klingon. And as Sheldon was finally given permission to kiss Amy for the very first time as her husband and she as his wife, he reflected on how unique and strange and out-of-order this entire marriage proceeding had been. And so them.
Rest of his life, here he comes.