Author's Note:

Hello, hello! New chapter time!

This one takes place during The Relaxation Integration. The chapter title and number lining up here was not planned, it's just a beautiful, happy accident.

Thank you as always to Stark, who managed to comment on my draft in between sharing JD Vance memes. And thanks to my Shamy friends on tumblr/discord for all your support!

Enjoy!


Sixteen


Several thoughts floated through Amy's head while she stood in front of the bathroom mirror that night brushing her teeth. There were the usual wedding planning thoughts that had been a constant hum in the back of her mind since Sheldon proposed, of course, but now they were also accompanied by the new worry of Sheldon's increased sleep-talking and what that could mean. She was still deciding on how she should proceed on that front, whether she should try to discuss it with him or not.

But oddly enough, those thoughts kept quieting down as another kept rising to the surface. It was something Sheldon had said earlier that day. They hadn't dwelled on it too much at the time, but now with the day winding down the conversation began to play over and over inside her head.

"I found the perfect wedding date. . . . It was May 19th, 1996 . . ."

"Sheldon, you were sixteen."

"And in Texas, no one would have batted an eye. . . ."

There was something about it. Something about the fact that Sheldon did not see a problem with marrying her as a teenager, had even imagined it and called it lovely. It got her thinking.

What if they had known each other back then?

It wasn't necessarily a new thought. Sometimes her love for Sheldon felt so great that it not only stretched ahead into the future but reached back into the past as well. Throughout the entire time she had known him, she had wished they could have meet sooner, but then she always corrected herself. Don't people say that timing is everything? Suppose they had met sooner, under different circumstances, and hadn't seen eye to eye. Perhaps they hadn't been ready for each other before. Perhaps they had met at exactly the time they were meant to and any other time wouldn't have worked out.

It was all silly speculation. Her theoretical physicist fiancé might dabble in the many worlds of the multiverse, but she had to focus on the world she currently lived in. And that was fine.

Except now Sheldon had posed this teenage wedding scenario and inadvertently made her second guess that line of thinking.

Maybe it wasn't timing at all. Maybe they would just always be together. Maybe there was a world where they married at sixteen in Texas and she spent all those lonely years being loved and supported instead. What could she have achieved then? What could they both have achieved?

Realizing that she had allowed herself to zone out for too long, Amy quickly finished brushing and flossing. When she stepped out of the bathroom she was greeted with the sight of Sheldon sitting up in their bed playing on his phone, clearly waiting for her to join him. Even though they had been living together for a year now, it still caused a warm, bubbly feeling to rise in her chest.

"Sheldon, can I ask you about something you said earlier?"

"Of course," he answered, looking up at her.

"Do you really think if we knew each other at sixteen we would have gotten married?" she asked while climbing into her side of the bed.

"Amy, I told you before, let it go," Sheldon said with a sigh. "We already determined that date wouldn't work."

"No, that's not what I'm asking," she said. "Don't worry about the date for a moment. I just want to know if you think we would have gotten married already if we'd known each other back then."

"Don't you?"

"I-I don't know," she stuttered, surprised by his surety. "It's lovely to think so, but things were so different when I was a teenager."

What she meant to say was that she was different. She wasn't the straightforward, accomplished scientist Sheldon had met at that coffee shop. She had been scrawny and awkward and desperate to fit in. Every person she tried to befriend ended up bullying her. Even knowing Sheldon also wasn't exactly popular among his peers, from what she'd heard of his past he seemed to achieve a greater level of acceptance than she did. Or, at the very least, he was so focused on his studies he didn't notice his lacking social life. He probably wouldn't have noticed her either.

"It's simple math," Sheldon continued, not picking up on her unspoken meaning. "We're engaged now and we've known each other for seven years. Pick a year for us to meet and add seven to it."

"I don't think it's that simple," she argued.

"You're right," he said. "We would have moved faster as teenagers."

Her eyebrows rose at this statement. Was Sheldon really implying what she thought he was? That if they had met while in the throes of puberty he wouldn't have been so resistant? It made sense, she supposed, though it was still hard to believe coming from him. She pictured their teenage selves as two balls of hormones set on a collision course, meeting with enough force to cause an explosion.

"Well, good night," he said, and the next thing she knew he was kissing her cheek before turning off his bedside lamp and settling in for sleep.

Amy almost shook his shoulder and forced him to sit back up, not ready to drop the conversation, but decided against it. There was no point in dwelling on what-if scenarios, at least not when it was Sheldon's bedtime and he was already dealing with troubled sleep. So she slid down into the covers beside him, her husband-to-be, and hoped that maybe his sleep-talking tonight would feature her.

She had her phone within easy reach to record him if it did.