Fic: Yellow Umbrella (1/1)
Title: Yellow Umbrella
Rating: G or PG
Character/Pairing: Future Daughter, Ted/Stella, Ted/Wife, mentioned Barney/Robin
Summary: Future Daughter angsts about the story she’s being told and the emotional attachments she has to certain relationships therein.
Length: 240 words
Spoilers: Through 4x03, I think.
Notes: It is somewhat sad that there has been no previous occassion for the use of a Stella tag, let alone Ted/Stella. Unfortunately, I couldn’t think of any -actual- fics involving them, so I had to do it in a roundabout sort of way. Oh, well. Enjoy!
She knows it’s going to end badly.
Even though she removed her mother’s name from her memory for optimum experience, she knows it won’t work out between her dad and Stella.
It’s not that she thinks they don’t love each other enough (they do) or that she knows she doesn’t have a thirty-year-old stepsister (she does) or that she thinks Aunt Robin was romantically connected to Ted again prior to becoming Mrs. Stinson-Scherbatsky (which her brother’s heart, bless the fool, is firmly set upon).
It’s not that she’s sure Dad couldn’t move to New Jersey (hey, they’re living in Maryland and Pennsylvania was home before that). It’s not that Mom isn’t in dermatology (she works at home, which Stella could very well do if she is in fact her mother) or that Ted and Robin have to be living in the apartment on his 31st birthday (maybe it’s temporary!) or that Stella doesn’t litter her speech and thoughts with excessive parentheses (perhaps she actually got it from Dad). It isn’t that all the signs point as far away from the couple working out as could be.
It’s that she didn’t kiss him three times when he brought back her yellow umbrella.
But as her brother says mockingly, “A girl can dream, can’t she?”
She punches him, then settles down to hear the story her father has designated “Stella!” And while she settles, she knows that she is hopelessly, heartbreakingly, wrong.