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A sharply slanted ray of sunlight woke Amy. The first thing she noticed was that her head was pounding. It had only been a few glasses of punch, damn it. Penny could drink eight times that much, adjusted for body mass, and still look like a crisp dewy rose in the morning. Amy felt like the blob.

The second thing she noticed was that the annoying ray of sunlight was coming through a window that no longer had any curtains.

"Sheldon, what did you do?" Amy sat up, feeling like her spine was a radioactive rod that had now been driven into her brain. The window, the wall next to it, the view of the street outside, all looked odd without the curtains. Those curtains had been there her entire life.

"You weren't using it. I can put it back. You don't need it." Sheldon's voice pierced like a hot needle through her brain, and not in the good hot-needle-through-the-brain way. For a moment there, last night, she had imagined he was going to kiss her. Then again, she imagined that all the time. By the harsh light of day, filtered through a hangover, it hat seemed unlikely.

Amy turned her head slowly. Sheldon was crouched defensively behind a stack of boxes, his hair dishevelled and a piece of packing tape stuck to his forehead. What boxes? She didn't have any boxes in her room.

She did now. Plenty of boxes. The rest of the space slammed into her conciousness, and she realized what she no longer had was a room.

"Sheldon, I don't understand." Amy found her glasses and put them on. It didn't make any more sense.

Her childhood bedroom was stripped down to four bare white walls and empty furniture. She could just make out the places where posters had been, but that was it. The closet was empty, the shelves bare, her desk a perfect expanse of nothing.

"This is clothes." Sheldon tapped one stack of boxes. "We'll drop them off at goodwill on the way. This is electronics to recycle, this is books to donate to the library, this is books to sell on ebay, this is books to burn because they have outdated science in them." Sheldon gestured to each neatly labeled box in turn.

"You sorted all this overnight?"

"It would have been much easier with a label maker. Remind me to buy you one for your birthday."

"Why, Sheldon? Why did you do this?" Amy tried not to sound angry. He probably wouldn't notice anyway. She just had to follow whatever train of logic he had ridden to dismantling her bedroom, which was the easy part, and solve it, which was the hard part. Then they could put it back.

Sheldon hesitated. That was rare. "You weren't using it. You haven't been here in three years."

"This is my childhood home, Sheldon. These things have sentimental and nostalgic value to me. I can't just throw them out."

"What things?" he asked.

What things!? "My stuff, Sheldon. Toys, books, memorabilia..."

What things?

All the books Amy had any intention of ever reading again were in her apartment, and so were any clothes she would wear. (Never again, she had sworn over the tie-dye.) But she had toys she was still fond of. She must have toys she was still fond of (she had seen all the Toy Stories,) she just couldn't think of any specific ones just then. And there were all those mixtapes and friendship bracelets and photobooth pictures and secret letters and...

Amy shook her head. There wasn't any of that. No one had ever made her a mixtape or a friendship bracelet. No one had sent her secret letters or crammed themselves into a photobooth with her to take goofy pictures.

It just really, really seemed like they should have.

She sighed. "Maybe the place needed a little sorting," she admitted.

"A little?" Sheldon threw up his hands in despair. "There was a Twix from 1997 in the back of your closet."

"I hid it so I would forget about it and then find it and it would be like getting a surprise present," Amy explained. "I'm still waiting to forget."

She looked around the empty room again, taking in the off-kilter, uncanny sensation of it all just being...gone. It was a little exhilarating, for some reason, and it probably wasn't even the remains of alcohol in her system talking. "But I still don't understand why you did this."

Sheldon wouldn't meet her eye. "I don't want you to think you need to come back here for anything. Not ever again."

The tiny sun in her chest lit up, hot and fierce and hard to talk past.

"It's an hour and a half through some of the most dangerous traffic in North America, and you'll make me come with you," Sheldon finished.

Amy couldn't help but smile, even though it made her head hurt worse. She stood up. "Let's get going before my mother wakes up."

"You're not going to say goodbye?"

Brave. He said she was brave. That wasn't a figment of her imagination. "I'll Skype her. Tommorow. Or next week."

She stepped around the boxes so she was looking up at him. He shied back a little. "Sheldon?"

"...yes?"

"Thank you."

"Was that sarcasm?"

"No." She reached up and pulled the tape off his forehead, and he let her. "We're not really going to burn my old books," she added.

Sheldon picked up a box. "We have to. All sorts of nonsense in them. A few say Pluto is still a planet."

"I thought you wanted Pluto to stay a planet."

"It was my favorite planet," he admitted, "Cold, dark, kind of crooked. But one has to keep up with the times, Amy Farrah Fowler. Things change."