Fic: Barely Coping (5/10)
Fandom: HIMYM (Samverse)
Pairing: Barney/Robin
Word Count: This part: 3145
Spoilers: mostly for idioticonion's "My Way" and "Valentine". Here, spoilers for 4.01.
Summary: Set in 2030. Barney's nephew Sam learns to deal with the loss of a loved one. This part: Lily and Robin go back to the apartment.
Thanks to: darlingchaos and roland44 for beta help.
AN: Isn't insomnia/procrastination awesome, guys? If you see typos, tell me about them so I can facepalm and fix them. That whole concrit thing would also be greatly appreciated too.
Previously: Part 1 // Part 2 // Part 3 // Part 4
Lily had refused to let Robin go home by herself that night. She could see her friend was completely exhausted by everything that had happened to her over the past three weeks, and knew that she shouldn’t have to face her empty apartment alone, because this was the first time she was coming back to stay since Barney had been shot.
“Here we are!” she says brightly, leading the way into Robin’s apartment and flicking the lights on. She turns back to her friend, giving her the most maternal smile she can manage. “Welcome home.”
Their apartment is the same way it’s been for years, but something’s different, and Lily can’t quite put her finger on why this doesn’t feel like Barney and Robin’s apartment any more. The only tangible difference is the thin layer of dust over everything because no one’s been living here for weeks. For Robin’s sake, Lily’s glad that all the gaudy floral bouquets had been sent from the funeral home to James’s house; to have her home perfumed with the sickly sweetness of a thousand dying flowers would have been too much.
Robin’s frozen in the doorway, blinking heavily as her eyes dart around her home. The relaxed air she’d had when first arriving at MacLaren’s, which wasn’t even an hour ago, is suddenly gone, and Lily sees that Robin’s jumping back in too quickly for even her own comfort. The dark circles under Robin’s eyes stand out in stark contrast to the sudden pallor of her skin, and Lily wonders how long it’s been since Robin got a good night’s sleep.
“Maybe this was a bad idea,” Lily says hesitantly. “You can stay at our place tonight, maybe come back once you’ve gotten some sleep…”
“No,” Robin says, a bit too firmly. “I came back to, you know, come back, not… not to avoid this place any longer.” It seems to take all her willpower just to take a step inside her own apartment, but she forces a smile at Lily. “I’m totally fine. I’ll get the suit- um, guest room ready for you.”
And she walks right past Lily, past the life-sized Stormtrooper (“Nah, that’s just awesome.”), past the leather sofa and the massive TV (“They had to ship it over on a tugboat like frickin’ King Kong!”), past the kitchen counter (“I just want to be with her all the time,” that desperate lovelorn look in his eyes, his entire body hanging over the counter as he poured out his heart to Lily), past the little kitchen table where Barney’d eaten his meals (“You’re my wife, you can tell me anything.”).
And now Lily’s alone in the room with hundreds of overlapping memories of Barney.
It must have been a thousand times worse for Robin; no wonder she’d run out so quickly.
Her eyes fall on an old picture of the five of them, hanging on the wall near the bookshelf (with books and porn displayed side by side). They’re sitting in the booth she and Robin had just left, a bottle of $2500 scotch on the table, all of them scooted close together. Relaxed. Comfortable.
Together.
They all look so young in that picture, Lily thinks.
She looks at everyone else’s faces before she looks at Barney. Marshall’s arm is slung casually over the back of her seat, like it still is today, and she remembers how she hadn’t drunk the expensive scotch that night because Mitch had been on the way. She sees Ted, who seems sadder than the rest of them even though he’s smiling too, and for a moment Lily wonders what that younger Ted had to be sad about, since the five of them had still been alive and together back then. His heartbreak over Stella and his plans for her and her daughter to be in that picture with the rest of them seem so trivial now. Everything does these days.
And then she looks at Robin and Barney, sitting across the table from her and Marshall, and her arm is linked through his and she’s snuggled close against him, and his collar is unbuttoned, and he’s just winking with ease at the camera like he hasn’t a care in the world, like he’s finally gotten everything he ever wanted, that he’s complete.
He’s been demoted to a memory behind the glass now.
Her thoughts were interrupted by a noise coming from the next room: Flump. Flump. Flump. Something soft is being thrown on the ground. She blinks her tears away hurriedly and heads off to investigate.
She opens the door to the guest room to find Robin in the middle of a chaotic jumble of suits that have been flung all over the room, taken off their hangers and thrown on the floor, the bed, ties hanging off the furniture like vines. She grabs another armful off the nearest rack - Lily notes that Barney’d had too many suits to fit even in the room’s walk-in closet, so he’d had to store them in the bedroom itself - and throws them on the pile to join the rest of their fallen comrades, all black and navy and charcoal and pinstripes and all those colorful dress shirts and ties overlapping to create bedlam.
“Robin?”
Robin looks up in the middle of grabbing still more of Barney’s suits… she’s got the kind of guilty air of a child caught doing something wrong, a look Lily knows far too well thanks to her own kids. “What?” she asks innocently.
“What are you doing?”
“I…” She looks at all the suits piled all over the floor as though just realizing they were there. “Nothing. They’re taking up space. They’ve got to go.” She stoops to gather an armful of suits.
“Whoa, sweetie,” Lily says, grabbing her by the shoulders to make her slow down. She hadn’t been able to see it from the doorway, but now she can feel that Robin’s trembling. “One thing at a time. Let’s just get some sleep first, huh?”
“You wouldn’t be able to sleep with all these… these things standing guard over you all night,” Robin tries to quip, smiling weakly, but the look on her face betrays her.
“I know,” Lily says, putting an arm around her best friend and guiding her gently out of the suit room. “Come on. I’m staying in your room. You’re not sleeping alone tonight.”
“I haven’t been sleeping alone,” Robin confesses in a small voice.
“I know,” Lily says again. And she does know, because even though, in the week leading up to the funeral, Robin had kept a suitcase at James’s house and had a cot set up with Ted’s wife and daughter, she’d heard Robin sneak out of the house every night, and heard her sneak back in every morning. Lily hadn’t gotten much sleep that week… after Marshall had cried himself to sleep every night, she’d lain awake for hours listening to the quiet hum of the house full of people tossing and turning in their beds, going through a mental checklist of what remained to be done before the funeral, and doing her best not to wallow in memories of Barney and thoughts of his absence.
Lily hasn’t cried, much. Not as much as she’s felt like doing, anyway. She’s had to put on a brave front for Marshall and her kids, and for Ted, because they’re depending on someone to be strong for them. Lily’s well-accustomed to being the rock for everyone, their source of comfort and strength when they can’t find peace on their own.
Robin needs her to be that person now more than ever.
And so Lily tries to find something to say to her friend, something that will actually comfort her. But there’s nothing at all she can say to fix this, so she just keeps her arm around Robin, hoping that that physical contact will be enough to somehow stabilize her.
Lily can’t even imagine what Robin’s going through, because she can’t picture what her life would be without Marshall. She’s tried, tried to empathize with her best friend so she can honestly tell her “I understand what you’re going through” even if it’s just hypothetical, but her mind starts to stutter at the thought of losing her husband, her life partner for nearly thirty-five years.
After all, her first husband’s already gone.
---
She pulls an old T-shirt out of her dresser and pulls it over her head while Lily brushes her teeth in the bathroom. It’s one of his - no, it’s hers now, he gave it to her. And without thinking too much about it, she opens up one of his drawers and grabs a pair of his old sweatpants. She figures she should probably wear pants to bed tonight too, since she’s sleeping with Lily.
She climbs under the covers, pulling them all the way up to her chin. She tries not to breathe too deeply, because her pillow smells just like his aftershave and that distinctive scent of his hair. She wants nothing more than to sleep at the moment - she can’t remember the last time she slept at all - but she keeps her eyes opened, locked on the sight of Lily brushing her teeth in the bathroom. If she closes her eyes for even a second, the sound of running water in the sink and the smell of him that’s permeating the sheets will create the illusion that he’s the one who’s getting ready to join her in here. And she’s not about to fool herself with that cozy image, because it’ll make it too hard to wake up without him beside her and realize for the millionth time that he’s gone.
She’d known it would be hard to come home and face her life without him. It was the only reason she’d been running for so long, hoping if she traveled long enough she could eventually forget about coming back here altogether. She just hadn’t known it would be quite this impossible.
And even though she’d known it had been ridiculous, since she’d felt him die and gotten his blood all over her dress like she was Jackie Kennedy and seen his coffin lowered into the ground… a tiny part of her had been hoping that he’d been hiding here all along.
And he had been. Just not in any sort of tangible form.
It had been especially hard to see all those suits standing at attention in their second bedroom, to picture him in every single one of them, to realize that he’d never wear any of them again. She’d snapped and thrown them all on the ground so the usual order of that room was destroyed, reflecting everything else in her life. As soon as humanly possible, she’d get them out of her home, burning them, if she had her way. They couldn’t stay here, not when they were so closely tied to him. If it were up to her, she’d get rid of everything in the apartment, or better yet, just move away so her refuge would actually be a haven from him, rather than yet another place where his memory haunted her.
And of all the places in the apartment and the city and the world that remind her of Barney, this bed is the absolute worst, and so she does her absolute best to keep the memories at bay so she, too, can rest in peace.
She’s resolutely not thinking of the mornings and afternoons and nights they’d spent in this very bed, with his lips covering hers (he was hungry and demanding but surprisingly tender) and her fingers laced in his hair (his hair had barely started to turn gray, how could he possibly be dead?), their bodies joined and moving as one, sighs and moans and shouted obscenities and three little words whispered against her skin -
She’d tried to scrub his scent off her skin by losing herself in other nameless men. Men that had looked just like younger versions of him. Men whose touch would cover the memory of his own fingers ghosting over her skin (he’d always instinctively known exactly what she’d needed, while none of them seemed to quite get it right).
Men whose homes she’d slip out of before the sunrise so they wouldn’t get a chance to leave her the way Barney had.
She knows now she’ll never escape him for as long as she lives. But returning to his epicenter is by far the most difficult thing she’s ever imagined herself doing.
Lily reenters the bedroom, dressed in her flannel pajamas, and gets in on Barney’s side of the bed. Her hand leans against the remote control resting on the nightstand, and the old massive TV in their bedroom clicks on, startling them both. There are synthesizers blaring through the surround sound speakers, that wistful, dreamlike intro she was so familiar with.
“Met you at the mall…”
Is her heart still beating? Is she still breathing? Suddenly, all that exists is “Sandcastles in the Sand,” and for all she knows she might have died too in that moment.
Barney had loved to use her old music video to get the two of them in the right mood (not that they’d ever needed any extra encouragement). They’d probably watched it six or seven thousand times just on Valentine’s Day that year, on the day that he’d been taken from her.
“Is that… Robin Sparkles?” Lily asks curiously, squinting at the gigantic screen as her eyes try to adjust to the glare.
Robin’s eyes are wide as she stares at the screen, swallowing hard. “Yeah,” she mumbles.
He’d used to adopt a high-pitched voice and calling her a fool, pretending to be Tiffany. She’d used to make him laugh by sloppily French-kissing him the way her teenaged self was learning to kiss Simon on the screen. Now, that same music, those same images, just ripped her open and made her blood stain her sheets. Can’t Lily see that?
“Oh my God!” Lily’s grinning broadly now. “I almost forgot that you made another music video!"
She doesn't reply, because she's unable to stop watching herself running along the beach.
“Together we were gonna travel the globe, from Alberta to Ontario…”
She’s not used to hearing this song without him singing along. It’s been years and years since the last time Robin Sparkles had sung her ballad without his accompaniment.
Lily’s giggling to herself over the ridiculous 1990s Canadian-ness of the video, and she can’t help but remember how Barney had behaved so similarly the first time he’d ever seen it, all those years ago. The way they’d laughed and leaned against one another watching it over and over… until they’d stopped watching.
“I miss you,” Robin Sparkles whispers, falling on her knees in heartbreak.
It suddenly seems so apropos that their song - or as close to an “our song” that the two of them had ever had - is a breakup song.
An adorable white robot with blinking yellow eyes rolls onto the boardwalk, handing Robin’s sixteen-year-old alter ego a yellow daisy. Lily chuckles. “You would have that robot in this video too…”
And Robin has no idea why, but something in her suddenly shatters (her composure? her sanity?), and she’s suddenly got tears flooding down her face and it’s so hard to find air, and she has no idea how or why it’s taken her this long to actually shed a tear over the man she loves (loved? loves).
“Oh, sweetie…”
Lily’s torn her eyes away from the screen and is looking at her with so much sympathy that Robin can’t bear it. She looks away from Lily, back to the screen with a masochistic determination.
Robin sniffles, taking deep breaths to try and calm down. She hates crying, because it prevents her from breathing and makes her feel even more messed up than she does otherwise. “I’m okay,” she says, her voice much higher than she’s ever heard it, tears still pouring down her cheeks like they’ll never stop.
Robin roughly wipes some of her tears away with the back of her hand, and dimly remembers what her mom had always told her growing up: that if she wiped away tears while she was still crying, it meant she didn’t care for who or what she was crying about. But it isn’t that Robin doesn’t care. It’s that she cares too much. Her hurt goes so deeply that she has no idea how she’s supposed to express it, to release some of these emotions so they don’t eat her from the inside out.
If she’d been upset for any other reason, she would have gone to the gun range for some target practice. It was just what she’d always done to help herself deal with her problems, a simple way for her to let out her aggression without hurting anyone so she’d feel like she was fighting back against the universe when it was causing her difficulties in her career or her relationships. Guns had always helped clear her head when she was upset or depressed.
She knows now she’ll never be able to go near a gun again, because something that had used to make her feel so good had now taken away the most important person in her life. It hadn’t been enough that he’d had to leave her; no, he’d had to go and take away her release system too, so she didn’t have a way to help herself heal.
“Honey, sometimes crying helps you feel better,” Lily says, wrapping an arm around Robin’s shoulders. “I’m not going to think less of you for…”
“I’m not crying,” Robin insists again, even though she feels waterlogged and it’s a struggle to get any words out, and her blatant lies are buried in something that sounds like sobbing. “I’m NOT. It… it’s the fucking screen. Hurts my eyes.”
Lily’s own eyes are watering slightly because the TV screen is so huge and so bright, but the crease between Lily’s eyebrows is one of concern, rather than one of sorrow. She can tell Lily doesn’t understand why the video is affecting her so much, because she didn’t even know it existed until three minutes ago. So how can she possibly understand what it really means?
Her eyes are shut tightly to prevent more tears from leaking out of her eyes. She feels two arms wrap tightly around her in a hug that tries to absorb some of her sorrow. “Yeah,” Lily says softly in her ear. “That doesn’t go away.”
It’s the opposite of what Robin wants to hear, because she can’t imagine pain like this going on forever. But she knows that what Lily’s saying now is the only thing in the world that’s true.
So Robin curls up in Lily’s lap like a small child and finally lets her grief run wild.
Next part...
Pairing: Barney/Robin
Word Count: This part: 3145
Spoilers: mostly for idioticonion's "My Way" and "Valentine". Here, spoilers for 4.01.
Summary: Set in 2030. Barney's nephew Sam learns to deal with the loss of a loved one. This part: Lily and Robin go back to the apartment.
Thanks to: darlingchaos and roland44 for beta help.
AN: Isn't insomnia/procrastination awesome, guys? If you see typos, tell me about them so I can facepalm and fix them. That whole concrit thing would also be greatly appreciated too.
Previously: Part 1 // Part 2 // Part 3 // Part 4
Lily had refused to let Robin go home by herself that night. She could see her friend was completely exhausted by everything that had happened to her over the past three weeks, and knew that she shouldn’t have to face her empty apartment alone, because this was the first time she was coming back to stay since Barney had been shot.
“Here we are!” she says brightly, leading the way into Robin’s apartment and flicking the lights on. She turns back to her friend, giving her the most maternal smile she can manage. “Welcome home.”
Their apartment is the same way it’s been for years, but something’s different, and Lily can’t quite put her finger on why this doesn’t feel like Barney and Robin’s apartment any more. The only tangible difference is the thin layer of dust over everything because no one’s been living here for weeks. For Robin’s sake, Lily’s glad that all the gaudy floral bouquets had been sent from the funeral home to James’s house; to have her home perfumed with the sickly sweetness of a thousand dying flowers would have been too much.
Robin’s frozen in the doorway, blinking heavily as her eyes dart around her home. The relaxed air she’d had when first arriving at MacLaren’s, which wasn’t even an hour ago, is suddenly gone, and Lily sees that Robin’s jumping back in too quickly for even her own comfort. The dark circles under Robin’s eyes stand out in stark contrast to the sudden pallor of her skin, and Lily wonders how long it’s been since Robin got a good night’s sleep.
“Maybe this was a bad idea,” Lily says hesitantly. “You can stay at our place tonight, maybe come back once you’ve gotten some sleep…”
“No,” Robin says, a bit too firmly. “I came back to, you know, come back, not… not to avoid this place any longer.” It seems to take all her willpower just to take a step inside her own apartment, but she forces a smile at Lily. “I’m totally fine. I’ll get the suit- um, guest room ready for you.”
And she walks right past Lily, past the life-sized Stormtrooper (“Nah, that’s just awesome.”), past the leather sofa and the massive TV (“They had to ship it over on a tugboat like frickin’ King Kong!”), past the kitchen counter (“I just want to be with her all the time,” that desperate lovelorn look in his eyes, his entire body hanging over the counter as he poured out his heart to Lily), past the little kitchen table where Barney’d eaten his meals (“You’re my wife, you can tell me anything.”).
And now Lily’s alone in the room with hundreds of overlapping memories of Barney.
It must have been a thousand times worse for Robin; no wonder she’d run out so quickly.
Her eyes fall on an old picture of the five of them, hanging on the wall near the bookshelf (with books and porn displayed side by side). They’re sitting in the booth she and Robin had just left, a bottle of $2500 scotch on the table, all of them scooted close together. Relaxed. Comfortable.
Together.
They all look so young in that picture, Lily thinks.
She looks at everyone else’s faces before she looks at Barney. Marshall’s arm is slung casually over the back of her seat, like it still is today, and she remembers how she hadn’t drunk the expensive scotch that night because Mitch had been on the way. She sees Ted, who seems sadder than the rest of them even though he’s smiling too, and for a moment Lily wonders what that younger Ted had to be sad about, since the five of them had still been alive and together back then. His heartbreak over Stella and his plans for her and her daughter to be in that picture with the rest of them seem so trivial now. Everything does these days.
And then she looks at Robin and Barney, sitting across the table from her and Marshall, and her arm is linked through his and she’s snuggled close against him, and his collar is unbuttoned, and he’s just winking with ease at the camera like he hasn’t a care in the world, like he’s finally gotten everything he ever wanted, that he’s complete.
He’s been demoted to a memory behind the glass now.
Her thoughts were interrupted by a noise coming from the next room: Flump. Flump. Flump. Something soft is being thrown on the ground. She blinks her tears away hurriedly and heads off to investigate.
She opens the door to the guest room to find Robin in the middle of a chaotic jumble of suits that have been flung all over the room, taken off their hangers and thrown on the floor, the bed, ties hanging off the furniture like vines. She grabs another armful off the nearest rack - Lily notes that Barney’d had too many suits to fit even in the room’s walk-in closet, so he’d had to store them in the bedroom itself - and throws them on the pile to join the rest of their fallen comrades, all black and navy and charcoal and pinstripes and all those colorful dress shirts and ties overlapping to create bedlam.
“Robin?”
Robin looks up in the middle of grabbing still more of Barney’s suits… she’s got the kind of guilty air of a child caught doing something wrong, a look Lily knows far too well thanks to her own kids. “What?” she asks innocently.
“What are you doing?”
“I…” She looks at all the suits piled all over the floor as though just realizing they were there. “Nothing. They’re taking up space. They’ve got to go.” She stoops to gather an armful of suits.
“Whoa, sweetie,” Lily says, grabbing her by the shoulders to make her slow down. She hadn’t been able to see it from the doorway, but now she can feel that Robin’s trembling. “One thing at a time. Let’s just get some sleep first, huh?”
“You wouldn’t be able to sleep with all these… these things standing guard over you all night,” Robin tries to quip, smiling weakly, but the look on her face betrays her.
“I know,” Lily says, putting an arm around her best friend and guiding her gently out of the suit room. “Come on. I’m staying in your room. You’re not sleeping alone tonight.”
“I haven’t been sleeping alone,” Robin confesses in a small voice.
“I know,” Lily says again. And she does know, because even though, in the week leading up to the funeral, Robin had kept a suitcase at James’s house and had a cot set up with Ted’s wife and daughter, she’d heard Robin sneak out of the house every night, and heard her sneak back in every morning. Lily hadn’t gotten much sleep that week… after Marshall had cried himself to sleep every night, she’d lain awake for hours listening to the quiet hum of the house full of people tossing and turning in their beds, going through a mental checklist of what remained to be done before the funeral, and doing her best not to wallow in memories of Barney and thoughts of his absence.
Lily hasn’t cried, much. Not as much as she’s felt like doing, anyway. She’s had to put on a brave front for Marshall and her kids, and for Ted, because they’re depending on someone to be strong for them. Lily’s well-accustomed to being the rock for everyone, their source of comfort and strength when they can’t find peace on their own.
Robin needs her to be that person now more than ever.
And so Lily tries to find something to say to her friend, something that will actually comfort her. But there’s nothing at all she can say to fix this, so she just keeps her arm around Robin, hoping that that physical contact will be enough to somehow stabilize her.
Lily can’t even imagine what Robin’s going through, because she can’t picture what her life would be without Marshall. She’s tried, tried to empathize with her best friend so she can honestly tell her “I understand what you’re going through” even if it’s just hypothetical, but her mind starts to stutter at the thought of losing her husband, her life partner for nearly thirty-five years.
After all, her first husband’s already gone.
---
She pulls an old T-shirt out of her dresser and pulls it over her head while Lily brushes her teeth in the bathroom. It’s one of his - no, it’s hers now, he gave it to her. And without thinking too much about it, she opens up one of his drawers and grabs a pair of his old sweatpants. She figures she should probably wear pants to bed tonight too, since she’s sleeping with Lily.
She climbs under the covers, pulling them all the way up to her chin. She tries not to breathe too deeply, because her pillow smells just like his aftershave and that distinctive scent of his hair. She wants nothing more than to sleep at the moment - she can’t remember the last time she slept at all - but she keeps her eyes opened, locked on the sight of Lily brushing her teeth in the bathroom. If she closes her eyes for even a second, the sound of running water in the sink and the smell of him that’s permeating the sheets will create the illusion that he’s the one who’s getting ready to join her in here. And she’s not about to fool herself with that cozy image, because it’ll make it too hard to wake up without him beside her and realize for the millionth time that he’s gone.
She’d known it would be hard to come home and face her life without him. It was the only reason she’d been running for so long, hoping if she traveled long enough she could eventually forget about coming back here altogether. She just hadn’t known it would be quite this impossible.
And even though she’d known it had been ridiculous, since she’d felt him die and gotten his blood all over her dress like she was Jackie Kennedy and seen his coffin lowered into the ground… a tiny part of her had been hoping that he’d been hiding here all along.
And he had been. Just not in any sort of tangible form.
It had been especially hard to see all those suits standing at attention in their second bedroom, to picture him in every single one of them, to realize that he’d never wear any of them again. She’d snapped and thrown them all on the ground so the usual order of that room was destroyed, reflecting everything else in her life. As soon as humanly possible, she’d get them out of her home, burning them, if she had her way. They couldn’t stay here, not when they were so closely tied to him. If it were up to her, she’d get rid of everything in the apartment, or better yet, just move away so her refuge would actually be a haven from him, rather than yet another place where his memory haunted her.
And of all the places in the apartment and the city and the world that remind her of Barney, this bed is the absolute worst, and so she does her absolute best to keep the memories at bay so she, too, can rest in peace.
She’s resolutely not thinking of the mornings and afternoons and nights they’d spent in this very bed, with his lips covering hers (he was hungry and demanding but surprisingly tender) and her fingers laced in his hair (his hair had barely started to turn gray, how could he possibly be dead?), their bodies joined and moving as one, sighs and moans and shouted obscenities and three little words whispered against her skin -
She’d tried to scrub his scent off her skin by losing herself in other nameless men. Men that had looked just like younger versions of him. Men whose touch would cover the memory of his own fingers ghosting over her skin (he’d always instinctively known exactly what she’d needed, while none of them seemed to quite get it right).
Men whose homes she’d slip out of before the sunrise so they wouldn’t get a chance to leave her the way Barney had.
She knows now she’ll never escape him for as long as she lives. But returning to his epicenter is by far the most difficult thing she’s ever imagined herself doing.
Lily reenters the bedroom, dressed in her flannel pajamas, and gets in on Barney’s side of the bed. Her hand leans against the remote control resting on the nightstand, and the old massive TV in their bedroom clicks on, startling them both. There are synthesizers blaring through the surround sound speakers, that wistful, dreamlike intro she was so familiar with.
“Met you at the mall…”
Is her heart still beating? Is she still breathing? Suddenly, all that exists is “Sandcastles in the Sand,” and for all she knows she might have died too in that moment.
Barney had loved to use her old music video to get the two of them in the right mood (not that they’d ever needed any extra encouragement). They’d probably watched it six or seven thousand times just on Valentine’s Day that year, on the day that he’d been taken from her.
“Is that… Robin Sparkles?” Lily asks curiously, squinting at the gigantic screen as her eyes try to adjust to the glare.
Robin’s eyes are wide as she stares at the screen, swallowing hard. “Yeah,” she mumbles.
He’d used to adopt a high-pitched voice and calling her a fool, pretending to be Tiffany. She’d used to make him laugh by sloppily French-kissing him the way her teenaged self was learning to kiss Simon on the screen. Now, that same music, those same images, just ripped her open and made her blood stain her sheets. Can’t Lily see that?
“Oh my God!” Lily’s grinning broadly now. “I almost forgot that you made another music video!"
She doesn't reply, because she's unable to stop watching herself running along the beach.
“Together we were gonna travel the globe, from Alberta to Ontario…”
She’s not used to hearing this song without him singing along. It’s been years and years since the last time Robin Sparkles had sung her ballad without his accompaniment.
Lily’s giggling to herself over the ridiculous 1990s Canadian-ness of the video, and she can’t help but remember how Barney had behaved so similarly the first time he’d ever seen it, all those years ago. The way they’d laughed and leaned against one another watching it over and over… until they’d stopped watching.
“I miss you,” Robin Sparkles whispers, falling on her knees in heartbreak.
It suddenly seems so apropos that their song - or as close to an “our song” that the two of them had ever had - is a breakup song.
An adorable white robot with blinking yellow eyes rolls onto the boardwalk, handing Robin’s sixteen-year-old alter ego a yellow daisy. Lily chuckles. “You would have that robot in this video too…”
And Robin has no idea why, but something in her suddenly shatters (her composure? her sanity?), and she’s suddenly got tears flooding down her face and it’s so hard to find air, and she has no idea how or why it’s taken her this long to actually shed a tear over the man she loves (loved? loves).
“Oh, sweetie…”
Lily’s torn her eyes away from the screen and is looking at her with so much sympathy that Robin can’t bear it. She looks away from Lily, back to the screen with a masochistic determination.
Robin sniffles, taking deep breaths to try and calm down. She hates crying, because it prevents her from breathing and makes her feel even more messed up than she does otherwise. “I’m okay,” she says, her voice much higher than she’s ever heard it, tears still pouring down her cheeks like they’ll never stop.
Robin roughly wipes some of her tears away with the back of her hand, and dimly remembers what her mom had always told her growing up: that if she wiped away tears while she was still crying, it meant she didn’t care for who or what she was crying about. But it isn’t that Robin doesn’t care. It’s that she cares too much. Her hurt goes so deeply that she has no idea how she’s supposed to express it, to release some of these emotions so they don’t eat her from the inside out.
If she’d been upset for any other reason, she would have gone to the gun range for some target practice. It was just what she’d always done to help herself deal with her problems, a simple way for her to let out her aggression without hurting anyone so she’d feel like she was fighting back against the universe when it was causing her difficulties in her career or her relationships. Guns had always helped clear her head when she was upset or depressed.
She knows now she’ll never be able to go near a gun again, because something that had used to make her feel so good had now taken away the most important person in her life. It hadn’t been enough that he’d had to leave her; no, he’d had to go and take away her release system too, so she didn’t have a way to help herself heal.
“Honey, sometimes crying helps you feel better,” Lily says, wrapping an arm around Robin’s shoulders. “I’m not going to think less of you for…”
“I’m not crying,” Robin insists again, even though she feels waterlogged and it’s a struggle to get any words out, and her blatant lies are buried in something that sounds like sobbing. “I’m NOT. It… it’s the fucking screen. Hurts my eyes.”
Lily’s own eyes are watering slightly because the TV screen is so huge and so bright, but the crease between Lily’s eyebrows is one of concern, rather than one of sorrow. She can tell Lily doesn’t understand why the video is affecting her so much, because she didn’t even know it existed until three minutes ago. So how can she possibly understand what it really means?
Her eyes are shut tightly to prevent more tears from leaking out of her eyes. She feels two arms wrap tightly around her in a hug that tries to absorb some of her sorrow. “Yeah,” Lily says softly in her ear. “That doesn’t go away.”
It’s the opposite of what Robin wants to hear, because she can’t imagine pain like this going on forever. But she knows that what Lily’s saying now is the only thing in the world that’s true.
So Robin curls up in Lily’s lap like a small child and finally lets her grief run wild.
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