Chapter Text
Amy’s eyes softened, a flicker of empathy breaking through her distant demeanor. “Fix what? What is that supposed to mean?”
“This.” he said quietly. “Everything I know, everything I’ve built in my mind, depends on her being here. And yet…” He gestured vaguely at the space between them, at the familiar yet strange version of Amy. “You don’t remember. Or you remember something else. Something… different.”
“I don’t know what’s wrong, Sheldon,” Amy said softly, her voice genuine but distant. “Maybe you’re just tired. You should get some rest.”
Sheldon shook his head, stepping back. “I did rest. Or at least, I think I did. But when I woke up, the parameters of my reality had been irreversibly altered.”
Amy watched him carefully, concern slowly replacing confusion. “Sheldon… have you talked to anyone else? Maybe—maybe Leonard could help you make sense of this.”
“I did talk to Leonard. He said the same thing you did. That we only dated briefly, and that you ended it. That you never moved in. That we were never—” he cut himself off, his voice catching.
He looked away, blinking rapidly.
Amy took a small step forward. “Sheldon, I’m not saying this to hurt you. But from everything I remember, what I said is true. I don’t know how else to explain it.”
“I do,” Sheldon said. “There’s been a shift in the timeline. A disruption in the causal chain of events that has led to this divergent outcome. I must’ve done something last night—somehow, I triggered a change. And now... I’m in a version of reality where you and I didn’t—”
His voice dropped again.
“—didn’t love each other.”
Amy’s breath hitched, almost imperceptibly. She seemed ready to respond, but instead looked down, her arms crossed tighter.
“Sheldon,” she said quietly. “I think you should go home. Get some sleep. If you still feel this way later, maybe we can talk more. But right now… I don’t know what you want me to say.”
He nodded once, mechanically, as if running through a checklist.
“Of course. Of course you wouldn’t. You’re not my Amy.”
He turned and walked away.
Amy stood in the doorway for a long moment, watching him disappear in the hallway. Then, slowly, she closed the door.
Sheldon climbed the stairs of his building, each step echoing like a countdown. His mind was no longer in chaos—it was calculating. Parsing variables. Searching for patterns.
This wasn’t grief. This was a data set.
By the time he reached the door of apartment 4B, he was muttering to himself. “Timeline disjunction. Spontaneous decoherence of quantum reference points. Or perhaps a consciousness transfer... no, no. More likely a multiversal bleed triggered by cognitive stress under high-stimulation conditions.”
He stepped inside and locked the door behind him.
The apartment felt colder now. Too quiet. Like it had forgotten how to contain the life that once filled it.
Sheldon walked past the whiteboards without looking at them. Instead, he went straight to his desk and opened his laptop.
“If I’m truly in a different timeline, there should be inconsistencies—subtle shifts in documented events, variations in scientific publications, minor changes in global outcomes. Anything that doesn’t match my memory.”
He typed quickly, bringing up news archives, his academic records, emails.
Birthdays. Anniversary dates. Text threads with Amy.
There was no shared Google calendar. No saved Valentine’s Day dinner reservations.
He opened a folder labeled “Personal,” then another one titled “Amy.”
It contained only two documents. One was a list of neuroscience references he’d compiled years ago to understand her work better. The other was a single note titled Apology Draft.
Sheldon clicked on it.
Amy,
I understand now that compatibility is more than matching IQs and shared interests.
I regret implying you were not…
…adequate.
—Sheldon
He stared at the draft.
Just a few lines. Unfinished. Hesitant.
Sheldon closed the document and leaned back in his chair, the soft creak of the leather breaking the silence. The note was clearly from this version of him—one who had hurt Amy in a different way, one who perhaps never had the chance to make things right.
Or maybe one who never tried.
He felt something heavy settle in his chest. Regret? Empathy? He wasn’t sure anymore.
He sat there for a long time, barely blinking, until the cursor on the screen faded into stillness. The room felt different now—not just quiet, but foreign. As though he were a guest in his own life.
His eyes drifted to the whiteboard. For the first time since he arrived, he approached it.
The problem set was incomplete. Notes scrawled in rushed handwriting—his own, and yet unfamiliar. He recognized the subject matter: theoretical modeling of wormholes, membrane theory interfaces, quantum decoherence. The corner of the board had a date. Last night.
It all came back in a slow, creeping wave.
He’d been working late. Deep into thought, his mind alight with possibilities. He’d made connections, speculated on overlap between cognitive awareness and string harmonics—what if perception could alter temporal stability under the right conditions? What if an observer’s mind could be the lens through which dimensions folded?
And then… lightning.
A storm.
The flicker of power. The sound of rain hammering the glass. He remembered getting up to make tea. The mug had been in its place—then moved slightly by a stray elbow. Just a few inches.
When he returned to his spot, something had felt… off. But he’d dismissed it. Too tired. Too charged from the work.
And he slept.
Sheldon slowly backed away from the board, as if proximity alone might trigger another shift.
It wasn’t just a theory. It had happened. Not a dream. Not a delusion. His memory—his eidetic memory—held the clues. The notes, the thoughts, the spark in the storm.
He spoke out loud, softly, reverently.
“The butterfly effect.”
The weight of it hit him all at once, and he staggered back into the couch.
“This reality… isn’t mine. Not exactly. Close, but altered. Like… a neighboring thread in the quantum fabric.”
His gaze shifted to the mug resting innocently on the table beside him.
Still off by a few inches.
He looked up again. Determined.
“If that’s true… if my consciousness slipped through a dimensional seam... then there has to be a way to return.”
His fingers trembled as he reached for his laptop once more. This time, he opened a new document.
Hypothesis: Conscious cognitive saturation paired with external electromagnetic interference can induce a localized rift between quantum states.
He typed rapidly, the words flowing in bursts.
Control variable: Me.
Trigger: Storm + spatial anomaly (tea mug displacement).
He paused, staring at the blinking cursor.
Conclusion pending.
He closed the file and looked around the apartment once again. He suddenly felt very small on it. The silence pressed in on him.
Amy wasn’t here. Not in this.. timeline. And the one who was here didn’t look at him like she used to. Like he mattered.
His eyes drifted to the empty side of the couch.
He needed to know more. Not just about the science—but about this world. This version of himself. What he had done. What he had lost.
This version of Sheldon… had chosen differently. Acted differently.
And somewhere along those choices, he had let Amy slip away.
He glanced back at his computer.
And then, almost against his will, his cursor hovered over the apology draft again.
He looked at it for a long second. Then, he highlighted the last word.
Typed one more line.
I was wrong.
Then saved it.
Amy sat in silence on the edge of her bed, still in the clothes she'd worn when Sheldon came to her door.
She wasn’t sure how long she remained there, motionless, listening to the soft hum of her apartment—the refrigerator buzzing, the faint tick of the wall clock, the rain that had eased into a steady drizzle outside.
Eventually, she moved.
She crossed the room slowly, as if each step might crack the floor beneath her. She went to her living room and sat on the edge of the couch, staring at the wall, her arms wrapped tightly around herself, a habit she thought she’d unlearned.
But inside her, something felt unsettled.
She replayed his words over and over.
“You’re not my Amy.”
Amy frowned and pressed the heels of her hands to her eyes.
She didn’t know what was happening to Sheldon—but something was happening. That much was clear. He wasn’t just being dramatic or eccentric. There had been a look in his eyes she hadn’t seen in years. Not confusion. Not arrogance.
Loss.
She'd heard many strange things from him over the years. Ramblings about time travel, theoretical babies, his allergy to change. But this was different.
This wasn’t one of his usual outbursts.
This was.. pain.
Raw, visible, human pain. And it had shaken her more than she dared to admit.
She stood up again and walked slowly to the window this time. The street below was empty, washed in the blue glow of the city lights and the remnants of last night’s storm. She pulled the curtain back, watching the wind rustle the trees.
She hadn’t thought about Sheldon in a long time. Not in that way.
Yes, they had dated—briefly, awkwardly. She ended it after realizing that no amount of patience or shared interests could bridge the emotional canyon between them. They’d remained in contact occasionally, exchanged emails about research, maybe bumped into each other at Caltech or events. But they’d never been… close.
At least, not in her memory.
And yet something about the way he looked at her this morning…
It made her feel as if she just failed a test she didn’t know she was taking.
Why did she feel like she was missing something? Was there really a version of herself—somewhere—who had chosen him? Who had loved him not in theory, but in practice?
Who had been loved back.
Amy rubbed her temples. “I don’t know what’s wrong, Sheldon,” she repeated to herself, echoing her earlier words.
But this time, they felt less certain.
And much less true.
He’d been too rigid, too distant. She hadn’t felt valued. She had to put a stop on their relationship, it was the right decision.
Right?
Then why did her stomach ache so much?
She blinked twice, suddenly unsure if the heaviness in her chest was sadness… or something else.
Perhaps guilt?
Amy turned away from the window abruptly, crossing into her small kitchen. She needed something to do. Tea, maybe.
But as she reached for her mug from the cabinet, she paused.
Sheldon always said how it was in the social protocol to offer a hot beverage to someone who was upset.
Sheldon.
He was occupying her mind again.
Maybe she’d check in on him later. Just to be sure he was okay.
Maybe.