Set directly after S7's finale. I own nothing.
The Band-Aid Conundrum
She runs a finger over the ring newly placed on her finger. It should make her happy, it should be everything she dreamed of, but somehow the glimmer of happiness is missing.
Once again he's at work and she's at home, so bored that she's done all her laundry and called family and begun rearranging her kitchen, and she can't help but wonder: is this how it's going to be for the next several decades? Her at home minding the kitchen and chores while he works? How much of this marriage will be him advancing in work and her staying at home to support him?
She realizes that maybe this isn't what she dreamed of, a proposal in a tiny, cluttered apartment, a guy who devotedly carries a ring in hopes of 'the right time' to propose, and use it after a game of several proposals. It should be romantic, but a smaller, less kind, part of her reminds her that she used to scorn such devotion – it was why she ended at least two relationships, a decade ago. And maybe he doesn't know her as well as she thought.
Finished with the vacuuming, she subsides onto the couch with a half-glass of wine. Bits and pieces of the last few years flood her mind: him buying her a new car; him sorting out her accidental marriage; a magazine article at the hairdressers', about how people could use big life events to try and smooth out the problems already there. A band-aid, they called it, and she knows that psychology is, according to Sheldon, an inexact science. Still, she thinks there's something to the analytical side of science, the way you can explain something with the correct label or term.
It occurs to her that this marriage would be a band-aid, of sorts. It won't change much: she'll probably still be unemployed and bored with house chores, while he works and she remains dependent on him. She'll probably still be drinking, probably have given up on her dreams because they're not sensible. Her group of friends will still be the same; to borrow Sheldon's word her life will remain homeostasis.
Or maybe he'll get her a job somewhere, trade her one menial job for another, and she'll still be beholden to him. She finds that she doesn't quite have enough energy left to dream, doesn't care for imagining the lush scenes she created as a child. She tries to summon up the dreams, of a sprawling apartment and hefty paychecks, of seeing her name in bold letters and pausing to sign autographs because someone on the street recognized her.
The dreams are gone, and she's traded much of what made her her for the sake of a guy. It's so unlike her younger self that she cringes a bit to think of it, but she's become so used to it that she's not quite sure who she is now.
Is this what growing up is?
She pours another half glass and sighs, spins the ring around her finger and watches the light sparkle through it. Maybe she has more to think about than she realized.