. . .

THE WONDER AMY PARADOX

Chapter Ten

"Sheldon?" It was a raspy whisper, as though far away.

He raised his head, squinting in the harsh light of the bathroom, unsure of how much time had passed since he watched his life go up in flames before his eyes. Before he'd yelled at Leonard to go away and leave him alone. Had he passed out from fear?

She stood in the bathroom doorway, but barely, her eyes lidded with pain. Gone was the defiant stance and sly smirks. Her hair was wet and limp and had something caught in it. The tiara was askew. Her skirt was ripped and her boots were caked in mud, and her glasses were so dirty it was a wonder she could see out of them. She held her lasso limply at her side and then she dropped it, as though even that was too much effort, before her knees buckled and she sagged against the door frame.

"Amy!" Sheldon struggled to get upright, catching her in his arms. "Amy?"

Crimson blood ran down over her eye to her cheek from under her tiara. Mixed with it was something dark and greasy, and it occurred to him that it was airplane fuel. She hissed when he held her, and he looked down to see red welts and blisters arising along her forearm. "Amy, these are burns! And where is all this blood coming from? You need to go to the ER. I'll get Penny or Leonard to drive -"

"No," she shook her head, "they will be . . . gone tomorrow . . . pain is temporary."

"I think you're in shock." Sheldon looked around the bathroom, desperate for an idea. Metahuman first aid was not a course he'd ever taken. If it was a course that even existed. His eyes settled on the shower. "How about a bath? Let's at least get you out of these dirty clothes."

Amy nodded weakly, and Sheldon started the water filling in the bathtub before he led her to the toilet to sit on the lid as he struggled to remove her breastplate and the rest of her clothes. Too weak to assist, Amy leaned against him as the blood and gasoline smeared on his own tee shirt. She groaned in pain as he removed her left boot, revealing a purple and swollen ankle. Sheldon held her foot and looked up at her. "You need medical attention. I think it's broken."

"No!" she yelled but then slumped further from the effort it had taken to do so. "It will heal. Please."

Her eyes were full of pain, but he couldn't withstand the begging gaze mixed in with it. Against his better judgement, he nodded and started on the other boot. He had to pull her upright and try to shimmy her panties down with one hand while she collapsed into his chest, no longer able to support herself on her ankle. How had she stood in the doorway? How had she gotten here? Her clothes were sodden and smelled of sea life. How different this was from the last time he'd undressed her.

At last she was naked, even her bracelets and tiara removed, and Sheldon picked her up whole and carried her to the bathtub. He lowered her just as gently into it as she had lowered the back half of that plane, careful not to jostle her injured body. Now that he could see all of her, he noticed bruises blooming like painful flowers all over her skin. There was an especially dark one on the bottom of her shoulder blade.

"Is the temperature okay?" he asked.

"Yes."

He let go of her just long enough to go to the sink and fill the glass he kept there with cold water, taking the opportunity to peel off his now dirty shirt, also. He knelt down next to the bathtub. "Here, drink this. I know it's the cup I use when I brush my teeth but -"

Reaching for the cup, Amy downed the water greedily. "Slow down, slow down!" Sheldon admonished, and, when she coughed at her overeager efforts, he patted her back. Then he took the empty glass and started the process of washing Amy, first her hair, pulling out the seaweed with disgust, scrubbing the caking blood and greasy fuel from her face, discovering a gash along her forehead hiding beneath. He got out a fresh washcloth to clean that and also for the smarting burn on her arm.

"I'm so sorry," he said when she whimpered at his ministrations and he looked up to see tears streaming down her cheeks. "I know it hurts, but I have to clean it thoroughly so that it doesn't get infected."

"It is not that," she said and then her voice broke. "I couldn't save them all. They were just children."

"Oh, Amy. I know." Sheldon put down the washcloth and leaned forward further, pulling her close to him, letting her wet body and hair soak him as she sobbed into his chest, her arms reaching up to clench his shoulders.

Sheldon held her until his arms and legs ached and the water turned cool, until her sobs turned into raspy hiccups, until she let him lift her out and carry her to bed, where he dried her and dressed her wounds as she stared off into the distance, nearly catatonic. From grief or pain or both? Holding it straight and wrapping it tightly, he especially fretted over her ankle. He covered her with extra blankets for warmth and then he stroked the uninjured side of her forehead and sang a lullaby from his childhood to her, about the softness and innocence of pets.

For the first time, she was still sleeping when Sheldon decided to get up the next morning. He'd tried to sleep on the floor beside her, but he only tossed and turned. Now, rubbing his face, he stood over her, studying her. Amy had curled in on herself in the middle of the bed and her face was peaceful, with none of the agony of the night before. Were her wounds really already healed? Her hair had dried during the night, and it fanned out around her as straight as it was every day in the lab.

Sheldon bent over to kiss that hair, and she shifted her head but did not wake. Her slumber was so deep she did not wake as he got out his clean clothes for the day or as he texted Leonard that he was working from home or as he went to the bathroom to shower and change or even as he stood in the doorway eating a bowl of cereal standing up, watching her sleep. What would Amy have done without him?, he wondered. Would she have gone back to her own place and collapsed, covered in the dregs of the ocean and her own blood? Would she had laid on the floor, sobbing as she had sobbed in his arms? One didn't think about superheroes needing help, but it made his heart hurt to think of her somewhere, alone and in pain, dirty and weak. He needed to find something to do other than worry.

Bringing her clothes and various accessories into the living room, Sheldon studied them. Later, he could go down to the basement and wash her underpants and skirt; even if they were ripped, they were all she had to leave in later and they were filthy. Maybe this would convince her to bring some extra clothing. The boots were caked in mud and silt, and he set to work scrapping the worst of it off, washing the heavy red leather, and then polishing them to a shine. After testing the polish on the hand grip, Sheldon applied the same care to her lasso, working hard to remove any small particles of flotsam from its braid.

He kept both ears on any sounds from the bedroom as he cleaned, but there were only the faint sounds of Amy's well-deserved oblivion. After the lasso, he cleaned the blood and fuel from her glasses, going to set them on the nightstand in the bedroom as another excuse to check on her. He had to keep working, keep his body busy, otherwise he would fall asleep and he didn't want to be asleep when she finally woke up.

Returning, he picked up her tiara and he studied it, tilting it in the sunlight from the window so that the center star sparkled. The stone was unusual, ever changing. Sometimes it looked red and sometimes blue and sometimes it glowed white. This, too, he washed and dried. He did the same with her bracelets and her breastplate, running his finger over a dent near the top with a shiver. That was new; it matched the bruise on her shoulder blade. Amy had said it was stronger than anything he knew but not indestructible; his stomach rolled at the thought of anything that could have damaged it so.

Under the kitchen sink he found his bottle of anti-tarnish fluid, and he rubbed each of these metal pieces, nursing them just as he'd nursed Amy last night. These actions did not feel like enough, but they were all he could do. At last, his neck and shoulders sore from bending over them for so long, her armor gleamed and blazed in the sunlight.

He was just admiring his handiwork when he heard her approach. "Amy!" Sheldon took fast steps toward the bedroom door, reaching out to support her. She had found his robe and wrapped herself in it. The bandage from her forehead had been removed, and her skin was smooth and whole where the gash had been. Her ankle, he noticed, was no longer swollen and the bandages hung loose, although she wasn't putting her weight on it when she stopped moving. "You shouldn't be up."

"I had to use the bathroom."

"Oh, yes. Well, back to bed with you. I'll bring you some breakfast there."

"I need to leave. I -" Her eyes were drawn to her armor as it reflected the sun back to them. "You cleaned everything."

"As well as I could. But I still have to wash your skirt."

Amy reached up and rested her palm on his cheek, her green eyes staring into his. She had found her glasses and put them on. With her straight hair and longer robe wrapped around her as a dress, she looked like Dr. Fowler. "Thank you."

"It was my pleasure." And my distraction, he did not add. "Come on, back to bed. I'll make you some food to build your strength. Please."

After a pause, she nodded and he walked with her, tucking her in. There was still a limp to her gait, and a purple-turning-brown bruise when he unwrapped her ankle. But it looked much better. Most of her other contusions were gone. When she asked him to remove the bandage on her arm, the skin was the bright pink puckering of new-born flesh but was no longer burned.

He made her both his famous French toast and eggs for protein and he prepared the strongest, largest mug of tea he owned. Amy ate it all with vigor, even all six eggs which Sheldon had thought he might share with her for lunch. The only pause in her consumption was to demand more butter. When he walked back in the bedroom after carrying the dirty tray to the kitchen, she was already asleep again, still wearing her glasses. He smiled and removed them.

Then Sheldon undressed down to his underpants and crawled in next to her, almost immediately falling asleep next to her warmth.

"But I saw you laugh!" Sheldon protested, angling closer to Amy in bed. "You said it perfectly captured Batman's personality."

She nodded. "I did and it does. But I still don't understand the concept. Why are those tiny plastics toys of superheroes so popular?"

"Because you can pose them and swap out their parts for different clothes or accessories. It's even possible to create your own new superheroes." After dinner, they'd watched Lego Batman together, and they were discussing the finer points as they undressed and got into bed. Or, rather, Sheldon got undressed. Amy still trotted around his apartment every evening in his pajama top, and Sheldon spent most of the time trying to ignore the creamy length of her legs.

"But why would you want to create your own superhero?" Amy asked.

"Because -" His phone rang, the song his mother's ringtone and he turned to look. "Sorry. Let me get this. It's late there, that's unusual."

The conversation was brief. Mary Cooper called it an emergency that Sheldon's brother-in-law had been in another motorcycle wreck, to which Sheldon rebutted it could no longer be an emergency when it happened every six months, and then his mother told him not talk to her that way.

"Your . . . brother, he is injured?" Amy asked as Sheldon hung up with a deep sigh.

"Brother-in-law, my sister's husband. Only mildly, a sprained wrist. Don't worry, it happens with alarming frequency."

"Tell me about your family."

Sheldon's eyebrows went up slightly, but only in pleasure. Amy had been more inquisitive and talkative since the plane crash last week, and he was finally having exactly the type of conversations he wanted, the chance to get to know each other on a deeper level. He told her about his family, about their various personalities and flaws. The only thing he left out was that his mother believed metahumans were demons sent to Earth as the first sign of an impending Armageddon.

"Fascinating. I cannot imagine so many siblings."

"Only two," Sheldon said. "Will you tell me about your family?"

"There is only my mother, the queen. I am an only child, so she is over-protective. She did not wish for me to leave my home with I did."

"And your father?"

"I don't have a father," Amy said simply.

A single eyebrow went up in disbelief. "That is not possible. Everyone has a father. Do you mean that you never knew him? That he wasn't in the picture since you were an infant?"

"No. I mean I do not have one. My mother so wanted a baby that she formed one out of sand and sang to it until Zeus brought me to life." Amy paused and tilted her head. "Perhaps you would consider him my father as I have inherited some of his powers. But we have never been in contact, and I don't feel any emotional connection to him."

"I want to say that's absurd, but then I live in a world with Aquaman." Sheldon leaned closer, intrigued. So little was known about Wonder Amy's home as she had never spoken about it since the H5V17 virus was blamed on its native flora. "What was it like growing up on Themyscira? What was school like?"

"There was not a school as you think of it. I had private tutors in many different subjects, leaders in their field."

"Because you were a princess? But what about the other children?"

Amy shook her head. "There were no other children, just as there were no men. I was the only child on the island. Just me and my mother and many aunts."

Shifting his legs under the sheets, Sheldon considered this. "I don't understand. Why were there no other children? Because there were no men?"

"Of course." Amy nodded.

"But what about desire - I mean, there was an obvious desire for children, if your mother made you out of sand."

"Yes, even we Amazonians have the desire to procreate," Amy said softly, looking down at the comforter. "But they traded the men necessary for procreation in order to remain hidden and peaceful. And, then, with time, it became apparent that we had traded not just the men, but also the ability to conceive children."

"What do you mean?" Sheldon asked, confused. "Obviously you left to live here among men, where, I don't think I need to remind you, you seem very skilled at using their sexual organs. Surely other women have done so, too."

"Yes, it used to be very common for the women to leave in small parties to find and mate with human men. But no children were ever conceived from these quests." Again, her eyes remained everted and her voice was quiet.

"That doesn't mean it's impossible, though, otherwise you wouldn't have used birth control when we were intimate."

Amy looked over at him. "I didn't use anything to prevent conception."

"What?" Sheldon roared and Amy flinched. He quieted his voice although he kept its steely tone. "What do you mean? I asked you if we needed protection and you said -"

"I said I was prepared. That was true. Because I knew I could not conceive with you."

"But you should have told me!"

"You should have asked for clarification and not assumed it was all my responsibility!" she snapped back. Her emerald eyes burned with frustration, but then she shook it away. "It doesn't matter. I am barren, Sheldon." She looked down again, and her eyes were suddenly sad. "It is the curse of my people. We have our monthly cycles in time with the moon and we celebrate it as a sign that we are women and our bodies are blessed and that we were fortunate enough to have lived another month, but, in private, we mourn what we have lost."

Sheldon opened his mouth and shut it without speaking. He had assumed that she meant that her birth control was already prepared, that perhaps there was a diaphragm already firmly in place. Now he realized not only how stupid he'd been but also how selfish and chauvinist that was. Just because he was a man did not mean he did not have an equal share of the burden to prevent an unplanned pregnancy.

But he did not say that because he had heard the ache in her voice. A pregnancy between them may have been unplanned, but it seemed that Amy would not have found it unwelcome. It crossed his mind that perhaps it had been her original intention that first night, to make him the father of her child, but then he remembered how she stayed, the raw honesty after the peak of their physical pleasure. It had never felt like he was being used. And she kept returning, even after he had told her he didn't want to be intimate with her until . . . well, until.

"Amy," he said softly, "are you sure? If you are half-goddess, can things be different for you?"

Amy shook her head softly. "There is a myth that an Amazonian can only conceive with a human male if the love is pure and selfless and if it endures great tests to prove that. It must be a love so untainted and deep that it would occur and endure in all possible universes, that in every version of themselves the same man and the same woman would find each other. And only then if Zeus smiles upon the union and if Aphrodite blows a wind that opens the womb to receive the gift of a child. But it is only a myth, told to soothe us into believing the only reason the most beautiful and most powerful amongst us could not go away and conceive was because there was not enough time for such a love to develop."

Yes, it had to be a myth, and Sheldon knew it. There was no way Aphrodite could blow a wind that would do such a thing. Not to mention it sounded uncomfortable to one's nether regions.

"Is that why you want to study metahuman sexuality and procreation? I'm certain you will find something, the answer you seek, in that. The answer is always science."

"There is no way to help." Amy pulled the comforter down and crawled under it, turning away from him as she removed her glasses. "Not even science this time, I am sure. There is nothing. I will always be barren. My womb is useless."

"Amy, I . . . " Sheldon sighed softly. He didn't know what to say. As much as he longed for personal and revealing conversations with Amy, he had not anticipated that it would turn out to be so burdensome. Although he had not considered having a child with, well, anyone, now that he knew it was impossible he felt the edge of an ache. But, Amy, poor Amy, was clearly heartsick over the loss.

Licking his lips, he remembered the day Howard had knocked on their lab door, there to show off Halley, and how Amy had scooped her up and played peekaboo with her in the hallway until the infant girl had laughed at her, great gurgling baby laughs. Sheldon had watched her out of the corner of his eye even as he talked with Howard, amazed by the change in her, as her countenance changed from serious and scholarly Dr. Fowler into bright and buoyant Wonder Amy.

Sheldon started again, softly, gently touching her shoulder. "Amy, it doesn't make you less of a person. A woman should not be defined by the status of her uterus. Just because a woman doesn't have a child - by choice or by fate - it doesn't make her less intelligent or less powerful or less of anything at all." He took a deep breath. "It does not change the way I feel about you."

"Maybe not right now. But it will." She reached over and turned off her lamp, plunging them into darkness.

To be continued . . .

. . . and sometimes being a superhero - and a woman - is hard.

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