Number Sixty Six (7/?)
Title: Number Sixty Six (7/?)
Author: Stablergirl
Rating: MA
Disclaimer: Still not mine.
::WARNING:: This CHAPTER contains explicit violence and abuse. Please use your discretion.
Chapter 7: Spiders and Flies (Part 2)
“Do you ever sleep? Like, at all?”
There was an old woman…
She gives Geoffry the makeup artist a pointed, poisonous look in the mirror and he huffs, daintily annoyed, pressing more cover-up beneath her eyes to try to hide the shadows there. It’s nothing she can control, she thinks angrily. She’s doing her best.
Who swallowed a fly…
Charlie Scherbatsky hadn’t been outside the station when she got there and she’d breathed a sigh of relief. She’d been feeling unpredictable, she’d been worried she might speak her mind, start something, regret something. He’d been noticeably missing and she’d decided to take that as a small victory. He’d been someplace else.
She breathes in deep and flips open a copy of In Style.
She pretends to be extremely interested in an article about matching trendy accessories with classic clothing and she hopes Geoffry will take the hint and cut out the chit chat.
There was an old woman who swallowed a spider…
Every ten seconds she thinks about Barney.
She doesn’t know what to say to him, but she’s pretty sure it would be something like that never should have happened yesterday. She’s pretty sure it would be something along those lines, spoken in a small self-deprecating voice, taking full responsibility.
She’s not big on looking at things with a carefully keen eye, but she knows the expression that had been on his face last night and she’d known, at the time, exactly what she’d been doing. She knows when something warrants an apology.
But sometimes it’s impossible to apologize without explanations, and explanations are the one thing she can’t bring herself to give him.
She doesn’t know what to say.
The entire hour she’s on the air Robin’s thinking about it. Thinking about ways she can make this up to him, ways she can set things right. She’s helping the guest chef whip up some homemade pecan sandies - she’s allergic and has to refuse to try them once they’re baked - and the whole time all she’s really doing is scripting out an apology, scripting out a way to tell Barney Stinson this is all her fault.
If she wasn’t so distracted lately by the shadows of her past she thinks she’d be put off by how attentive he’s been, how quiet and genuine and exactly what she needs. If she wasn’t so distracted she’d be thinking how odd it is that every time she shows up at his door he’s alone inside his apartment. He’s never busy, never preoccupied or distant like he’d sometimes been before.
If she wasn’t so distracted she’d be confused by him.
Instead she’s taking all of those things for granted. She’s greedy for his kindness, for the nearness of him.
She’s seeking his attention, silently requesting that he help her, soaking in the way she feels when he’s sitting next to her and has his arm wrapped around her shoulders, taking advantage of his tendency to leave things alone - to refuse to ask questions. She’s doing things like showing up and telling him to screw her so she’ll forget that she sometimes wants to die. And he hasn’t complained.
Normally that would make her pause and tilt her head. Instead she’s just grateful.
She’s found herself lately thinking about what it would be like to step into oncoming traffic at Columbus Circle or Times Square…how the crowds would gasp, the tourists would shield their children’s eyes, the impact would push her so far back she would disappear into the air and everything would stop.
This all would slow down and then it would stop. She thinks she would feel relieved.
I don’t know why she swallowed that fly…
She needs to see Barney.
Perhaps she’ll die.
She needs to make things up to Barney.
When the director yells that the episode’s a wrap, instead of stepping in front of a Honda or an Audi Robin rushes to the back hallway because she needs to go, get out of here, she needs to go to GNB and open up her mouth.
She doesn’t know what to say.
But god damn-it, she’s going to try to think of something.
She pushes into her dressing room and she starts to frantically gather her things, shoving them into her bag, paying no mind to whether her papers get wrinkled or her mascara leaks or her phone opens up and dials a wrong number. She doesn’t care. She’s focused on I’m sorry, and thank you, and I promise this will all get better. She needs to at least make this one thing right, fix something, apologize like she should’ve done before. She’s out of breath, fighting with her sweater, trying desperately to turn it right-side-out, and that’s when whatever apologies and reconciliations she’d been planning sink down and disappear.
Her plans change.
There was an old woman who swallowed a spider.
A voice says “What’s the hurry?” and she’d recognize it anywhere.
Everything changes, then, and she freezes, stops moving, stops breathing, stops thinking of Barney and stops thinking completely. She stands perfectly, eerily still.
Robin Scherbatsky holds her breath and plays dead.
“RJ?” he asks and she feels her jaw twitch with it, “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
Her eyes adjust to the low lighting of the room, the orange glow, the soft tint of the bulbs around the mirror and she finds herself wishing for the harshness of fluorescents. She finds herself wishing her dressing room had an overhead light fixture that would get rid of all the shadows. Instead the shadows own her, instead they move and breathe and cling to the corners and the walls. There aren’t any windows. Robin’s having trouble finding air.
“Stop doing this,” she forces out, watching Charlie shift on his feet in the corner, crossing his arms, his dark suit rustling in the stillness and his mouth tipping into a crooked grin. The orange light catches on his perfectly shined shoes.
“I just want you to hear me out,” he tells her, his voice like the twisting tendrils growing from the mouth of a Venus flytrap.
She shakes her head.
“Nothing you say will ever…” she starts, her sweater dropping to the floor so that her fists can clench, so that her mind can focus. Her vision narrows.
“I know, I know,” he admits, nodding, walking the perimeter of the room, reaching out and picking up a book from her bookshelf, looking it over, putting it back with a frown. She feels hate boiling in her blood. She feels frozen. She glances at the door. “You’re certainly justified in being angry, RJ.”
She hears her thoughts come out of his mouth and her stomach twists.
“I’m sure I can never make any of this up to you. But you’ll regret it, someday, if you keep pushing me away.” He’s calm. He’s always much too calm. Robin blinks her eyes and shifts on her feet, her fingers pinching the skin of her palms.
“Is that a threat?” she asks. He chuckles, sounding so very Charlie Scherbatsky, and she hates him.
“No, no, of course not. It’s just…” he sighs, stepping forward toward her. She resists her urge to back away and she wonders how old habits can still live inside of her, how she can still be afraid of him even now, even grown, even more than able to defend herself. “It’s like you don’t trust me at all.”
She wonders where the hell he comes up with this stuff.
She wonders where she left her gun as he gets closer to her, as his eyes shine in the light with that hard look she’d learned to fear, as she thinks she catches the scent of whiskey on his breath. Her hands clench tighter and she bites her cheek, trying hard to stay calm.
Calm.
Controlled. Easy and simple and someplace else.
Robin holds her breath.
Robin plays dead.
“Hear me out,” he instructs. She just looks at him, quiet, motionless. He sighs. “When you were younger, RJ, I just wanted you to be…”
“Someone else?” she fills in, bitter and frosted and steely. He stares at her.
“Don’t say that,” he spits, and it’s the sound of him tightening up and she hears somewhere in that the ringing of warning bells.
But she wants to be different than she’s been before. She wants to wake up, she thinks. She wants to handle this. She’s been waiting.
“It’s the truth, isn’t it?” she has a fierce feeling in the pit of her stomach, she fires words at him like bullets, she tries hard to shake the frozen state of her body and her mind, she fights off her instincts because this is happening, and she’s been waiting.
She’s been waiting for this.
“No,” he responds forcefully, “No of course that’s not the truth, but I know that’s what you think,” he’s even louder now, losing his tightly wound control, and a sick deep-seeded part of her is glad to watch it happen, glad to shake the ice from his voice, glad to make him crazy, glad to turn the tables and say things she knows will cut to the bone. “That’s why I’m here - to explain that I never wanted you to be someone you’re not. I was wrong, I know that now, but you have to understand, I was…”
“I don’t care,” she interrupts and her hands feel shaky at her sides. Her tongue is loaded with venom, now. She’s waking up from a deep kind of sleep. “I don’t care what you have to say,” her eyes blink at him, “I don’t want you in my life,” her words cut and land against him, “I don’t want you around here, I don’t want to have to talk to you, and I don’t want to have to look at you,” it’s not enough, “You make me sick,” she adds and it’s water logged but she doesn’t care. She’s all sorts of pinched and jaded and she wonders if the people walking down the hall outside can hear them, if they’re paying this any mind.
Probably not. People never do.
“Robin,” he says angrily. She doesn’t ever remember hearing her full name come out of his mouth. She doesn’t like the sound of it. “I’m your father.” It’s stern and it’s demanding and if she’s honest it feels like news to her. All of this sounds foreign and she has an impossible time believing it. She raises her eyebrows. “I love you,” he promises and she laughs watching his face turn red, angry, the warning bells in the back of her mind getting louder. “I raised you, god damn-it. I’m your father and I should be a part of your life.”
She inhales a deep breath then, she breathes and she speaks, thinking she’s been waiting for this. She’s been waiting for the day this would have a chance to spill from her lips and into his ears and she bites at the consonants hard, she bites at the phrase, she chews on it and she takes a daring step toward him as she does. She says “You’re not my father.”
And she doesn’t see the next part coming because it’s been too many years, she doesn’t have that instinct inside of her anymore.
She doesn’t remember.
She says “You’re not my father,” and within seconds his hand is relentless against her, just as it’s always been - she doesn’t see it coming as he slaps her hard so that light explodes behind her eyes - gray and purple and red amoebas creeping into her vision - he slaps her so that her jaw is pulsing with the pain of him, his anger a mark on the side of her face, the force of it knocking the wind out of her, cutting into her skin. Shock floods through her veins and she looks at him, startled, wondering how, even now when she’s grown, he needs to mark her, step on her, belittle her and cut her open.
She feels a flash of pity for the girl she’d been at eight years old, imagining this must’ve been worse, then…this must’ve been so much worse when she was small and when she hadn’t expected him to hate her.
She vaguely and distantly wonders why the hell she’s bothered boxing all these years if - in a situation like this - she forgets how to duck. She vaguely and distantly wonders why she’s spent so many hours at the shooting gallery if - in a situation like this - she’s going to leave her gun at home.
She tastes pewter from the gash his slap has made on her lower lip and she swallows.
She doesn’t back down.
She doesn’t stay quiet and she doesn’t play dead.
She’s been waiting for this, so she says it again.
“You’re not my father.”
It’s solid and sure, and she doesn’t blink when he slaps her a second time, harder, angrier.
He slaps her for a second time and in moments like these it’s impossible to know what exactly goes wrong. She doesn’t know if it’s her own unsure footing that sends her off balance or if it’s the force of him. She doesn’t know if she trips and stumbles or if his hand has sent her too far - she doesn’t know. All she knows is that all at once she’s falling back and she’s falling down and she hears her skull hit the edge of her makeup table and she feels her torso land hard against the corner of her chair and she thinks it should probably hurt.
Snapping twigs stuck between concrete.
She hears it.
She thinks it should probably hurt.
“Ungrateful,” he calls her, and it’s water logged but she doesn’t care.
It seems a bizarre name to be given when all that she has to thank him for are scars, nightmares, joints that ache when it rains.
He reaches down and he grabs at her forearms and he holds tight, maybe - she thinks - maybe trying to pull her up, maybe deep down trying to pull her up from this, but his grip is unforgiving like Robin’s stare, Robin’s eyes, unforgiving like Robin herself has learned to become, and she feels the pinch of her blood vessels popping, bruising, turning red where his fingers dig into her.
She thinks he’s maybe trying to pull her up.
But this other weighted thing gets pulled up, instead. This thing she tries to only vaguely remember, this part of things, this distant way that somebody had once colored her black and blue. It’s jerked up to the surface, now, unsteady, spilling out. Her lips part in shock and tears fall before she can stop them because what had once been the ghost of things is now pressed into her flesh - the anger of him, the way he can’t seem to control it. He leaves finger prints behind. He marks her- she can feel it. She remembers, she knows that later the purple of him, the irritated red and eventually the sour apple green of him will be left behind on the cool peach of her skin.
She breathes in and she feels that familiar sting, sharp and insistent - another bruised rib inside of her chest - and she wonders why he always attacks the same spots on her body, why he strikes her again and again in the same ways, the same places where she’s already weak and where she’s already been christened by his anger.
It’s been years, but this is still the same.
The only difference now are the tears she can see in his eyes, the way she can see that he doesn’t want to be doing this, the grown up perspective she has on things and the weathered regret she can see in the lines of his face.
The only difference now is that they’re both so much older.
“Why do you do this?” she wants to know, “Why do you always do this?”
And just as soon as the anger started in him, it stops - sudden.
There’s a sudden shift in the air, a sudden break in the storm as her father’s eyes seem to clear.
He let’s go, sudden.
He steps away from her, sudden.
And it’s like she’s given him some kind of broken realization.
She wonders hazily if he really has been trying to change…trying to fix things. He’s not the kind who’ll succeed with it, though, she doesn’t think. She has proof of that in the blood on her tongue, the marks on her arms, the dull ache at the back of her head. He rubs at his face with his hands, tired, remorseful as he looks down at her, disappointed, regretting mostly - she figures - the ways this had happened instead of regretting the hundreds of ways he’s let her down, over and over and over again.
“I’m sorry,” he breathes and she doesn’t look at him. She just sits there on the floor and she wonders if this makes him feel better, if having her at his feet and broken does something to make him feel better. “I didn’t want…” but it’s an unfinished thought, an unfinished sentiment that he’ll never really be able to give her.
And then he’s gone, and she’s alone and everything here is achingly familiar.
She stays eerily still.
She is silent as the grave.
**
There was an old woman who swallowed a spider.
**
She goes to MacLaren’s.
She waits until she doesn’t feel dizzy or unsteady. She waits until she’s strong and something close to normal and she tugs on a long sleeved sweater, she puts ice on her lip, doing her best to cover the gash with makeup and make it less noticeable. She covers the bruise starting on her cheek and she practices moving in ways that irritate her injured ribs, making sure she can do it without reacting. She doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t grimace. She clicks into auto pilot and she forgets as much as she can.
She goes to MacLaren’s.
Of course whatever work she’s done to make her bruises invisible isn’t enough because her friends are the kind of friends who actually notice her, look at her hard and see when something isn’t right. It only takes about thirty seconds before Ted frowns and leans forward.
“What the hell happened to you?” he asks, gesturing toward her swollen lip.
She swallows.
She rolls her eyes and forces a grin.
She doesn’t know what to say.
She feels somebody’s stare burning the side of her face but she ignores it and she crosses her arms on the tabletop.
“Boxing,” she explains easily, airily, weightless and flippant. The table is silent. “I box.”
“You box?” Lily repeats, skeptical, frowning, and Robin clears her throat.
“Yeah. I kick ass, too,” she promises feebly. She tries to make a joke, “I bit off a girl’s ear today.”
None of them laugh.
“You box,” Ted says, sounding like it’s ludicrous, “and you’ve just never mentioned this?” and Robin shifts uncomfortably, thinking she used to be better at lying, she used to be better at fending off the questions and running from the scene before conclusions could be drawn.
The problem now is that she doesn’t really know why she doesn’t just say it.
Why she doesn’t tell the truth.
Habit, she thinks. Survival.
“Do I have to tell you every single thing about my life, Ted?” she spits at him and he reels back, away from her, startled by the sharp tone of her voice and she feels the burning stare on her skin get a little bit hotter so she turns toward the source - Barney, whose face is knowing and whose eyes are hard on her as he’s searching her expression…
And she remembers suddenly that he knows a little more than everybody else, he knows a little more than Ted and a lot more than Lily, certainly plenty more than Marshall, and he’s sitting here just staring at her and she feels like any second she’ll totally lose it. She remembers suddenly that Barney Stinson seems to see straight through her.
She feels her lungs tighten. She feels it getting harder to breathe.
She feels him pouring oil and blood out into the air.
She was supposed to make things right with him, before her past got in the way.
She was supposed to say I’m sorry.
She opens her mouth, inhaling, exhaling, trying to speak, to fill this up with something, to push away her growing panic, but before she can say anything Barney’s talking and the energy at the table shifts.
“Oh, she boxes, I’ve seen it,” he promises, refusing to break her gaze for a beat and then turning to Ted and lifting his gin and tonic to his lips.
“How have you…”
“I’m glad you asked, Ted.” He’s swallowing and shifting so he can better address the group, and attention has been diverted and Robin feels her lungs expand, open up, relax. Barney clears his throat. “I sponsor a young lady at Robin’s gym by the name of Christine Truman.”
Robin watches Ted roll his eyes, she watches Lily glance at Marshall, she watches the table land in the palm of Barney’s hand.
“Christine is a foxy boxer in training, and let me just say…foxy is an understatement,” Barney leers. “Just the other day, in a sheer stroke of accidental lucky charm, Christine Truman stepped into the boxing ring with one very fierce Robin Scherbatsky,” he gestures toward her and winks. “The two went head to head, I watched, and before you ask - yes it was as magically delicious as it sounds.” Robin listens as he flips into that certain tone he usually reserves for reminiscing, “It was sweaty, it was sticky, hopes were dashed and dreams came true. Scherbatsky got her barely covered ass handed to her. I think, all in all, the most accurate description of the Truman/Scherbatsky show down would have to be…” he sighs, nods sagely, puts a hand on Robin’s shoulder - and, god, she feels the touch burn right down to the heart of her, “…legendary,” he finishes, soft, philosophical, poetic.
Ted, Lily, and Marshall all laugh, and Robin doesn’t know, now, how she’ll ever make all of these things up to Barney Stinson. She doesn’t know, now, what she can possibly do.
She doesn’t know how to not stare at him, warm and grateful and on the verge of breaking open.
“I can’t believe you box,” Marshall comments, laughing, squinting at her and looking closer at her bruised lip. She clicks her tongue and tilts her head, cocky, smiling at him, sliding into the witty repartee because she doesn’t really have a choice. Her mind is reeling but she forces a smile.
It’s habit.
Survival.
“Robin Scherbatsky in the boxing ring,” Lily adds, “damn, that’s hot.”
“Can we come see you fight?” Ted wants to know with a twinkle in his eye, and she pretends to think it over, she slides out of the booth and stands up, heading toward the jukebox, trying to make a stealthy escape.
“Maybe if you buy me another beer,” she teases, winking, and she walks away from them, breathing deeply, ducking into the hallway by the bathrooms and leaning against the wall there, trying to remind herself of…she doesn’t even know what anymore.
She’s pressing a hand to her chest, feeling the bruises at her side, trying to get herself to calm down.
She’s resting her head back against the wall behind her carefully, sure not to jostle the bump that’s formed beneath her hair, letting her eyes slide closed, begging her mind to relax.
It doesn’t.
Instead, she’s thinking about everything she’s done wrong and her eyes are shut, clenched tight, desperately trying to keep tears at bay...
There was an old woman who swallowed a fly.
And it’s the familiar, soothing smell of him that tips her off. It’s his cologne, hanging in the air around her. Robin doesn’t open her eyes because she can’t…because she’ll forget how to be calm and how to keep these things to herself…she can’t because, god, she’s just…
“Your gym is closed,” Barney reminds her.
She doesn’t know what to say.
(To Chapter 8)
Author: Stablergirl
Rating: MA
Disclaimer: Still not mine.
::WARNING:: This CHAPTER contains explicit violence and abuse. Please use your discretion.
Chapter 7: Spiders and Flies (Part 2)
“Do you ever sleep? Like, at all?”
There was an old woman…
She gives Geoffry the makeup artist a pointed, poisonous look in the mirror and he huffs, daintily annoyed, pressing more cover-up beneath her eyes to try to hide the shadows there. It’s nothing she can control, she thinks angrily. She’s doing her best.
Who swallowed a fly…
Charlie Scherbatsky hadn’t been outside the station when she got there and she’d breathed a sigh of relief. She’d been feeling unpredictable, she’d been worried she might speak her mind, start something, regret something. He’d been noticeably missing and she’d decided to take that as a small victory. He’d been someplace else.
She breathes in deep and flips open a copy of In Style.
She pretends to be extremely interested in an article about matching trendy accessories with classic clothing and she hopes Geoffry will take the hint and cut out the chit chat.
There was an old woman who swallowed a spider…
Every ten seconds she thinks about Barney.
She doesn’t know what to say to him, but she’s pretty sure it would be something like that never should have happened yesterday. She’s pretty sure it would be something along those lines, spoken in a small self-deprecating voice, taking full responsibility.
She’s not big on looking at things with a carefully keen eye, but she knows the expression that had been on his face last night and she’d known, at the time, exactly what she’d been doing. She knows when something warrants an apology.
But sometimes it’s impossible to apologize without explanations, and explanations are the one thing she can’t bring herself to give him.
She doesn’t know what to say.
The entire hour she’s on the air Robin’s thinking about it. Thinking about ways she can make this up to him, ways she can set things right. She’s helping the guest chef whip up some homemade pecan sandies - she’s allergic and has to refuse to try them once they’re baked - and the whole time all she’s really doing is scripting out an apology, scripting out a way to tell Barney Stinson this is all her fault.
If she wasn’t so distracted lately by the shadows of her past she thinks she’d be put off by how attentive he’s been, how quiet and genuine and exactly what she needs. If she wasn’t so distracted she’d be thinking how odd it is that every time she shows up at his door he’s alone inside his apartment. He’s never busy, never preoccupied or distant like he’d sometimes been before.
If she wasn’t so distracted she’d be confused by him.
Instead she’s taking all of those things for granted. She’s greedy for his kindness, for the nearness of him.
She’s seeking his attention, silently requesting that he help her, soaking in the way she feels when he’s sitting next to her and has his arm wrapped around her shoulders, taking advantage of his tendency to leave things alone - to refuse to ask questions. She’s doing things like showing up and telling him to screw her so she’ll forget that she sometimes wants to die. And he hasn’t complained.
Normally that would make her pause and tilt her head. Instead she’s just grateful.
She’s found herself lately thinking about what it would be like to step into oncoming traffic at Columbus Circle or Times Square…how the crowds would gasp, the tourists would shield their children’s eyes, the impact would push her so far back she would disappear into the air and everything would stop.
This all would slow down and then it would stop. She thinks she would feel relieved.
I don’t know why she swallowed that fly…
She needs to see Barney.
Perhaps she’ll die.
She needs to make things up to Barney.
When the director yells that the episode’s a wrap, instead of stepping in front of a Honda or an Audi Robin rushes to the back hallway because she needs to go, get out of here, she needs to go to GNB and open up her mouth.
She doesn’t know what to say.
But god damn-it, she’s going to try to think of something.
She pushes into her dressing room and she starts to frantically gather her things, shoving them into her bag, paying no mind to whether her papers get wrinkled or her mascara leaks or her phone opens up and dials a wrong number. She doesn’t care. She’s focused on I’m sorry, and thank you, and I promise this will all get better. She needs to at least make this one thing right, fix something, apologize like she should’ve done before. She’s out of breath, fighting with her sweater, trying desperately to turn it right-side-out, and that’s when whatever apologies and reconciliations she’d been planning sink down and disappear.
Her plans change.
There was an old woman who swallowed a spider.
A voice says “What’s the hurry?” and she’d recognize it anywhere.
Everything changes, then, and she freezes, stops moving, stops breathing, stops thinking of Barney and stops thinking completely. She stands perfectly, eerily still.
Robin Scherbatsky holds her breath and plays dead.
“RJ?” he asks and she feels her jaw twitch with it, “I didn’t mean to startle you.”
Her eyes adjust to the low lighting of the room, the orange glow, the soft tint of the bulbs around the mirror and she finds herself wishing for the harshness of fluorescents. She finds herself wishing her dressing room had an overhead light fixture that would get rid of all the shadows. Instead the shadows own her, instead they move and breathe and cling to the corners and the walls. There aren’t any windows. Robin’s having trouble finding air.
“Stop doing this,” she forces out, watching Charlie shift on his feet in the corner, crossing his arms, his dark suit rustling in the stillness and his mouth tipping into a crooked grin. The orange light catches on his perfectly shined shoes.
“I just want you to hear me out,” he tells her, his voice like the twisting tendrils growing from the mouth of a Venus flytrap.
She shakes her head.
“Nothing you say will ever…” she starts, her sweater dropping to the floor so that her fists can clench, so that her mind can focus. Her vision narrows.
“I know, I know,” he admits, nodding, walking the perimeter of the room, reaching out and picking up a book from her bookshelf, looking it over, putting it back with a frown. She feels hate boiling in her blood. She feels frozen. She glances at the door. “You’re certainly justified in being angry, RJ.”
She hears her thoughts come out of his mouth and her stomach twists.
“I’m sure I can never make any of this up to you. But you’ll regret it, someday, if you keep pushing me away.” He’s calm. He’s always much too calm. Robin blinks her eyes and shifts on her feet, her fingers pinching the skin of her palms.
“Is that a threat?” she asks. He chuckles, sounding so very Charlie Scherbatsky, and she hates him.
“No, no, of course not. It’s just…” he sighs, stepping forward toward her. She resists her urge to back away and she wonders how old habits can still live inside of her, how she can still be afraid of him even now, even grown, even more than able to defend herself. “It’s like you don’t trust me at all.”
She wonders where the hell he comes up with this stuff.
She wonders where she left her gun as he gets closer to her, as his eyes shine in the light with that hard look she’d learned to fear, as she thinks she catches the scent of whiskey on his breath. Her hands clench tighter and she bites her cheek, trying hard to stay calm.
Calm.
Controlled. Easy and simple and someplace else.
Robin holds her breath.
Robin plays dead.
“Hear me out,” he instructs. She just looks at him, quiet, motionless. He sighs. “When you were younger, RJ, I just wanted you to be…”
“Someone else?” she fills in, bitter and frosted and steely. He stares at her.
“Don’t say that,” he spits, and it’s the sound of him tightening up and she hears somewhere in that the ringing of warning bells.
But she wants to be different than she’s been before. She wants to wake up, she thinks. She wants to handle this. She’s been waiting.
“It’s the truth, isn’t it?” she has a fierce feeling in the pit of her stomach, she fires words at him like bullets, she tries hard to shake the frozen state of her body and her mind, she fights off her instincts because this is happening, and she’s been waiting.
She’s been waiting for this.
“No,” he responds forcefully, “No of course that’s not the truth, but I know that’s what you think,” he’s even louder now, losing his tightly wound control, and a sick deep-seeded part of her is glad to watch it happen, glad to shake the ice from his voice, glad to make him crazy, glad to turn the tables and say things she knows will cut to the bone. “That’s why I’m here - to explain that I never wanted you to be someone you’re not. I was wrong, I know that now, but you have to understand, I was…”
“I don’t care,” she interrupts and her hands feel shaky at her sides. Her tongue is loaded with venom, now. She’s waking up from a deep kind of sleep. “I don’t care what you have to say,” her eyes blink at him, “I don’t want you in my life,” her words cut and land against him, “I don’t want you around here, I don’t want to have to talk to you, and I don’t want to have to look at you,” it’s not enough, “You make me sick,” she adds and it’s water logged but she doesn’t care. She’s all sorts of pinched and jaded and she wonders if the people walking down the hall outside can hear them, if they’re paying this any mind.
Probably not. People never do.
“Robin,” he says angrily. She doesn’t ever remember hearing her full name come out of his mouth. She doesn’t like the sound of it. “I’m your father.” It’s stern and it’s demanding and if she’s honest it feels like news to her. All of this sounds foreign and she has an impossible time believing it. She raises her eyebrows. “I love you,” he promises and she laughs watching his face turn red, angry, the warning bells in the back of her mind getting louder. “I raised you, god damn-it. I’m your father and I should be a part of your life.”
She inhales a deep breath then, she breathes and she speaks, thinking she’s been waiting for this. She’s been waiting for the day this would have a chance to spill from her lips and into his ears and she bites at the consonants hard, she bites at the phrase, she chews on it and she takes a daring step toward him as she does. She says “You’re not my father.”
And she doesn’t see the next part coming because it’s been too many years, she doesn’t have that instinct inside of her anymore.
She doesn’t remember.
She says “You’re not my father,” and within seconds his hand is relentless against her, just as it’s always been - she doesn’t see it coming as he slaps her hard so that light explodes behind her eyes - gray and purple and red amoebas creeping into her vision - he slaps her so that her jaw is pulsing with the pain of him, his anger a mark on the side of her face, the force of it knocking the wind out of her, cutting into her skin. Shock floods through her veins and she looks at him, startled, wondering how, even now when she’s grown, he needs to mark her, step on her, belittle her and cut her open.
She feels a flash of pity for the girl she’d been at eight years old, imagining this must’ve been worse, then…this must’ve been so much worse when she was small and when she hadn’t expected him to hate her.
She vaguely and distantly wonders why the hell she’s bothered boxing all these years if - in a situation like this - she forgets how to duck. She vaguely and distantly wonders why she’s spent so many hours at the shooting gallery if - in a situation like this - she’s going to leave her gun at home.
She tastes pewter from the gash his slap has made on her lower lip and she swallows.
She doesn’t back down.
She doesn’t stay quiet and she doesn’t play dead.
She’s been waiting for this, so she says it again.
“You’re not my father.”
It’s solid and sure, and she doesn’t blink when he slaps her a second time, harder, angrier.
He slaps her for a second time and in moments like these it’s impossible to know what exactly goes wrong. She doesn’t know if it’s her own unsure footing that sends her off balance or if it’s the force of him. She doesn’t know if she trips and stumbles or if his hand has sent her too far - she doesn’t know. All she knows is that all at once she’s falling back and she’s falling down and she hears her skull hit the edge of her makeup table and she feels her torso land hard against the corner of her chair and she thinks it should probably hurt.
Snapping twigs stuck between concrete.
She hears it.
She thinks it should probably hurt.
“Ungrateful,” he calls her, and it’s water logged but she doesn’t care.
It seems a bizarre name to be given when all that she has to thank him for are scars, nightmares, joints that ache when it rains.
He reaches down and he grabs at her forearms and he holds tight, maybe - she thinks - maybe trying to pull her up, maybe deep down trying to pull her up from this, but his grip is unforgiving like Robin’s stare, Robin’s eyes, unforgiving like Robin herself has learned to become, and she feels the pinch of her blood vessels popping, bruising, turning red where his fingers dig into her.
She thinks he’s maybe trying to pull her up.
But this other weighted thing gets pulled up, instead. This thing she tries to only vaguely remember, this part of things, this distant way that somebody had once colored her black and blue. It’s jerked up to the surface, now, unsteady, spilling out. Her lips part in shock and tears fall before she can stop them because what had once been the ghost of things is now pressed into her flesh - the anger of him, the way he can’t seem to control it. He leaves finger prints behind. He marks her- she can feel it. She remembers, she knows that later the purple of him, the irritated red and eventually the sour apple green of him will be left behind on the cool peach of her skin.
She breathes in and she feels that familiar sting, sharp and insistent - another bruised rib inside of her chest - and she wonders why he always attacks the same spots on her body, why he strikes her again and again in the same ways, the same places where she’s already weak and where she’s already been christened by his anger.
It’s been years, but this is still the same.
The only difference now are the tears she can see in his eyes, the way she can see that he doesn’t want to be doing this, the grown up perspective she has on things and the weathered regret she can see in the lines of his face.
The only difference now is that they’re both so much older.
“Why do you do this?” she wants to know, “Why do you always do this?”
And just as soon as the anger started in him, it stops - sudden.
There’s a sudden shift in the air, a sudden break in the storm as her father’s eyes seem to clear.
He let’s go, sudden.
He steps away from her, sudden.
And it’s like she’s given him some kind of broken realization.
She wonders hazily if he really has been trying to change…trying to fix things. He’s not the kind who’ll succeed with it, though, she doesn’t think. She has proof of that in the blood on her tongue, the marks on her arms, the dull ache at the back of her head. He rubs at his face with his hands, tired, remorseful as he looks down at her, disappointed, regretting mostly - she figures - the ways this had happened instead of regretting the hundreds of ways he’s let her down, over and over and over again.
“I’m sorry,” he breathes and she doesn’t look at him. She just sits there on the floor and she wonders if this makes him feel better, if having her at his feet and broken does something to make him feel better. “I didn’t want…” but it’s an unfinished thought, an unfinished sentiment that he’ll never really be able to give her.
And then he’s gone, and she’s alone and everything here is achingly familiar.
She stays eerily still.
She is silent as the grave.
**
There was an old woman who swallowed a spider.
**
She goes to MacLaren’s.
She waits until she doesn’t feel dizzy or unsteady. She waits until she’s strong and something close to normal and she tugs on a long sleeved sweater, she puts ice on her lip, doing her best to cover the gash with makeup and make it less noticeable. She covers the bruise starting on her cheek and she practices moving in ways that irritate her injured ribs, making sure she can do it without reacting. She doesn’t flinch. She doesn’t grimace. She clicks into auto pilot and she forgets as much as she can.
She goes to MacLaren’s.
Of course whatever work she’s done to make her bruises invisible isn’t enough because her friends are the kind of friends who actually notice her, look at her hard and see when something isn’t right. It only takes about thirty seconds before Ted frowns and leans forward.
“What the hell happened to you?” he asks, gesturing toward her swollen lip.
She swallows.
She rolls her eyes and forces a grin.
She doesn’t know what to say.
She feels somebody’s stare burning the side of her face but she ignores it and she crosses her arms on the tabletop.
“Boxing,” she explains easily, airily, weightless and flippant. The table is silent. “I box.”
“You box?” Lily repeats, skeptical, frowning, and Robin clears her throat.
“Yeah. I kick ass, too,” she promises feebly. She tries to make a joke, “I bit off a girl’s ear today.”
None of them laugh.
“You box,” Ted says, sounding like it’s ludicrous, “and you’ve just never mentioned this?” and Robin shifts uncomfortably, thinking she used to be better at lying, she used to be better at fending off the questions and running from the scene before conclusions could be drawn.
The problem now is that she doesn’t really know why she doesn’t just say it.
Why she doesn’t tell the truth.
Habit, she thinks. Survival.
“Do I have to tell you every single thing about my life, Ted?” she spits at him and he reels back, away from her, startled by the sharp tone of her voice and she feels the burning stare on her skin get a little bit hotter so she turns toward the source - Barney, whose face is knowing and whose eyes are hard on her as he’s searching her expression…
And she remembers suddenly that he knows a little more than everybody else, he knows a little more than Ted and a lot more than Lily, certainly plenty more than Marshall, and he’s sitting here just staring at her and she feels like any second she’ll totally lose it. She remembers suddenly that Barney Stinson seems to see straight through her.
She feels her lungs tighten. She feels it getting harder to breathe.
She feels him pouring oil and blood out into the air.
She was supposed to make things right with him, before her past got in the way.
She was supposed to say I’m sorry.
She opens her mouth, inhaling, exhaling, trying to speak, to fill this up with something, to push away her growing panic, but before she can say anything Barney’s talking and the energy at the table shifts.
“Oh, she boxes, I’ve seen it,” he promises, refusing to break her gaze for a beat and then turning to Ted and lifting his gin and tonic to his lips.
“How have you…”
“I’m glad you asked, Ted.” He’s swallowing and shifting so he can better address the group, and attention has been diverted and Robin feels her lungs expand, open up, relax. Barney clears his throat. “I sponsor a young lady at Robin’s gym by the name of Christine Truman.”
Robin watches Ted roll his eyes, she watches Lily glance at Marshall, she watches the table land in the palm of Barney’s hand.
“Christine is a foxy boxer in training, and let me just say…foxy is an understatement,” Barney leers. “Just the other day, in a sheer stroke of accidental lucky charm, Christine Truman stepped into the boxing ring with one very fierce Robin Scherbatsky,” he gestures toward her and winks. “The two went head to head, I watched, and before you ask - yes it was as magically delicious as it sounds.” Robin listens as he flips into that certain tone he usually reserves for reminiscing, “It was sweaty, it was sticky, hopes were dashed and dreams came true. Scherbatsky got her barely covered ass handed to her. I think, all in all, the most accurate description of the Truman/Scherbatsky show down would have to be…” he sighs, nods sagely, puts a hand on Robin’s shoulder - and, god, she feels the touch burn right down to the heart of her, “…legendary,” he finishes, soft, philosophical, poetic.
Ted, Lily, and Marshall all laugh, and Robin doesn’t know, now, how she’ll ever make all of these things up to Barney Stinson. She doesn’t know, now, what she can possibly do.
She doesn’t know how to not stare at him, warm and grateful and on the verge of breaking open.
“I can’t believe you box,” Marshall comments, laughing, squinting at her and looking closer at her bruised lip. She clicks her tongue and tilts her head, cocky, smiling at him, sliding into the witty repartee because she doesn’t really have a choice. Her mind is reeling but she forces a smile.
It’s habit.
Survival.
“Robin Scherbatsky in the boxing ring,” Lily adds, “damn, that’s hot.”
“Can we come see you fight?” Ted wants to know with a twinkle in his eye, and she pretends to think it over, she slides out of the booth and stands up, heading toward the jukebox, trying to make a stealthy escape.
“Maybe if you buy me another beer,” she teases, winking, and she walks away from them, breathing deeply, ducking into the hallway by the bathrooms and leaning against the wall there, trying to remind herself of…she doesn’t even know what anymore.
She’s pressing a hand to her chest, feeling the bruises at her side, trying to get herself to calm down.
She’s resting her head back against the wall behind her carefully, sure not to jostle the bump that’s formed beneath her hair, letting her eyes slide closed, begging her mind to relax.
It doesn’t.
Instead, she’s thinking about everything she’s done wrong and her eyes are shut, clenched tight, desperately trying to keep tears at bay...
There was an old woman who swallowed a fly.
And it’s the familiar, soothing smell of him that tips her off. It’s his cologne, hanging in the air around her. Robin doesn’t open her eyes because she can’t…because she’ll forget how to be calm and how to keep these things to herself…she can’t because, god, she’s just…
“Your gym is closed,” Barney reminds her.
She doesn’t know what to say.
(To Chapter 8)