HIMYM fic: Friday Morning Sabotage
Title: Friday Morning Sabotage
Fandom/Pairing: HIMYM, Barney/Robin
Rating: R, smexxiness
Disclaimer: Sadly, I own nothing.
WC: 1,900
Summary: Even when he's away on a shady business trip, Barney can still send Robin into a flustered tailspin.
Author’s Note: I have not written any honest-to-goodness BrOTP in ages! This was fun. Fits either post-finale as a stand-alone, or current events in the RP… your call!
Friday Morning Sabotage
Robin Scherbatsky has a routine.
At two o’clock in the morning, she goes to the all-night diner down the street, buys a coffee, and hails a cab. Sometimes she tells the cab driver why she’s going to the only television studio above 90th on the East Side. Sometimes she pretends that she’s still a reporter instead of a morning show host. Other times she proudly tells the driver about Come On, Get Up, New York. It depends on her mood. Either way, for some reason, she’s usually chatty.
At 2:30, she sits in a makeup chair with coffee and a newspaper. Marcie sweeps a makeup brush over her eyes and cheeks while she talks about her fifteen-year-old son and lazy-no-good boyfriend, and Robin nods politely as she flips through the metro news.
At 3:00, she sifts through index cards with interview questions in her dressing room and gets into wardrobe. At 3:30, she drops by guests’ dressing rooms to say hello. At 3:50, she has a meeting to fight off any particularly inane morning-show ideas with Ray, the head producer, and her co-host, and by 3:55, she’s sitting in her chair on set, waiting for the taping to begin. At 3:57, she lets Marcie redo her lipstick, and at 4:00, she braces herself for the usual on-set disaster that happens the moment the On Air lights go on.
Once the disaster was a toucan, which belonged to that morning’s guest from the Bronx Zoo, and got free and flew around the studio for thirty minutes before caught. Once her chair broke the second she leaned slightly backward, so that any audience who happened to be watching at home saw her legs fly up over her head the second it cut from commercial. And once, every light in the studio went out the moment she went off the TelePrompTer and ad-libbed “we have our best show ever for you today!”
The disaster was obviously her least favorite part, but the routine was like clockwork, and within a few weeks of working on Come On, Get Up, New York, Robin came to expect it.
This Friday morning, Robin’s routine was entirely sabotaged by Barney Stinson.
And the worst part was, he wasn’t even in the city. Or the state. Or the country. For all she knew, he was six feet under somewhere on the outskirts of Tokyo, shady GNB business dealings gone entirely wrong, seven bullets lodged right next to that stupid extra awesome gland of his.
Of course, there was always the small possibility that he was just off getting a lap dance at a club by the airport, drowning in scotch and women, grinning like a mad fool for pulling off the greatest escape from coupledom ever accomplished. But somehow she trusted him when he looked at her with regret drenching his voice and said that this was GNB, and he had to do it.
On this particular Friday morning at two o’clock, Robin throws her arm out at a passing cab, balancing her coffee, checking her wallet for cash. She tells the driver the address of the studio. She takes a breath and settles back into the seat.
She hasn’t slept in two days. Hasn’t let herself. And now, with the cabbie talking softly on his cell phone, traffic drifting slowly along even at this hour, her eyes begin to droop. The cabbie’s saying something, but she doesn’t feel like talking. Her mind begins to wander.
“Miss me?” Barney’s voice whispers in her ear, his breath hot on her cheek. His fingers trail over her knee, delicately pulling her leg toward him to spread them a little wider. She nods. “Miss me even though it’s only been six days?” he teases, and his lips are on the skin under her ear, his tongue gently tasting, and she shivers. His fingers make their way up the inside of her thigh, teasing tiny circles, and when they reach the apex of her thighs, she bites her lip. Her skirt is gathered at her hips and he pushes the damp fabric of her panties aside. “You do miss me,” he whispers, husky, and his fingers dip inside her, wet and hot, stroking hard inside and then up, and she jerks with a moan so suddenly that there’s coffee all over the seat and Barney’s disappeared and the cab driver is yelling at her in what she can only guess is very angry Arabic.
Robin sits upright with cheeks flushing as the cab driver pulls over and waves his arms at her, pointing out the vaccuumed floors and gleaming seats and demanding an extra cleaning fee from her. Then he kicks her out of the cab.
She doesn’t have any more money with her, and she’s only halfway to the studio, so she walks the rest of the way in the rain. Her new shoes have rubbed a blister on her heel, and her hair is completely soaked, and it’s only thirty minutes until showtime by the time she swipes her security pass at the door.
She forgoes the extra coffee and the newspaper, just quickly jumps into Marcie’s hair-and-makeup chair, and lets the older woman go to work on her. Marcie makes her take off her wet clothes and puts her in a robe, then tut tuts and dries and fluffs and adds gel and mousse and detangler, and by the time she’s begun Robin’s makeup, Robin can’t pay attention anymore.
Barney’s standing in the doorway of the hair-and-makeup room with his arms crossed, leaning against the frame and smirking at her. “Let yourself get all wet,” he says with a shake of his head, clicking his tongue. “Tsk.” He looks around the tiny room, disapproving, and plays with his tie when his eyes meet hers again. “If I were your boss, I’d have to make sure that never happened again.”
And how would that go, she wonders silently, but she doesn’t have to say the words because he’s locking into her gaze and the corner of his mouth turns up into a dangerous smile. “I’d haul you into my office and pound out a few ground rules.” Then he’s striding toward her and she doesn’t have time to point how how cliché that innuendo is because he’s leaning over and his hand is in her robe and he’s got her nipple between his fingers, cupping her breast firmly. She’s about to shout that Marcie’s still in the room, but then it’s just them and he pinches her nipple lightly. A cry halts in her throat as he takes her other hand, pressing it to his groin. “And if I were your boss, I’d make sure you never took your mind off this during the entire broadcast.”
He drops his head and kisses her throat, his thumb flicking over her nipple and sliding down her side, hooking under her thigh. The robe drops open but she can’t think or breathe because he’s painfully hard in her hand and his lips on her throat are scorching and she doesn’t care if Marcie is or isn’t there, she wants him now.
“But I’ve got my own job,” he breathes as he kisses her mouth, and then he’s disintegrated altogether. Marcie’s adding concealer under her eyes and Robin’s got the heel of her palm pressed to her mouth. She looks over to the door and she knows it’s just some kind of torturous fantasy, but the door is swinging a little, so she pushes Marcie’s hand away and jumps up to chase maybe-him down the hall.
She winds up tangled in the footrest, smacks her head on the counter, and has to hold a compress to her head right up until 3:57, when Marcie tut tuts some more as she reapplies Robin’s lipstick.
Ray’s shooting her worried-yet-annoyed looks as they prepare to go live, and Robin’s feeling so fuzzy from the apparently-imaginary kiss that she can still feel pressed into her neck, not to mention the concussion she’s probably sporting, that she barely remembers to brace herself for the daily last-minute disaster.
They’re live in three… two… the On Air light’s on and she snaps the compress down and behind her chair and everyone’s waiting for her to speak and Barney might never be coming back.
“Good m-” Her voice breaks off.
This is it. This is a disaster. This is a complete, total disaster.
She’s known Barney Stinson for four years and she’s barely even had sex with him. Barely kissed him. Barely had a chance to ask all the questions she has for him, barely had a chance to laugh at all his ridiculous jokes and all the good ones too, barely had a chance to feel his fingers on the curve of her waist, barely had a chance to wrap her naked body around his and let him send her screaming over the moon, barely had a chance to acknowledge that she’s aching and pulsing for him and it’s not just because he’s really, really good at sex.
Barely had a chance to say I love you out loud and she’s made a disaster of everything because she’s been such a blind, stubborn idiot who took chances on everything but him.
She’s clutching the sides of her chair, the words frozen in her throat, and she hears him say, “Man up, Scherbatsky” in her ear and she finds herself telling New York to come on and get up.
Somehow she makes it through the hour, through the interviews with a local radio DJ who’s celebrating twenty years on air without missing a day of work, through the archery demonstration with an expert from Queens (she totally nails it, target practice came in handy), and the final goodbyes with a six-year-old singer with a superiority complex. Then she nearly runs off set to her dressing room because everything’s wrong and she just needs to see him but GNB’s got him in their web and god damn Tokyo-
An arm reaches out and grabs hers as she passes through the backstage area filled with lights and racks of old costumes, left over from the days when the studio functioned as a sketch comedy show.
And she’s in his arms in the dark, hidden just behind a rack of marching band costumes and boy, he kisses like no tomorrow, no tomorrow. She wants to speak, tell him to get his ass back home from Japan and forget all about GNB because this isn’t enough, this fantasy hidden somewhere backstage, but he presses her to the wall and grinds his hips against hers and the moan that escapes her lips feels real enough. “I’m gonna make you come right here, Scherbatsky,” he groans as his fingers slip into her panties and find her still wet and trembling. “Gonna make you feel every inch of it, make you beg for it…”
She can’t hear him any more because he’s stroking her, pounding into her with his fingers and she’s melting into the wall, a whistling scream escaping her throat, and his mouth is on hers as she shatters and comes around his fingers.
When the janitor spots her behind the lights and costumes a few minutes later, she’s sunk down on the floor with her knees up, still breathing hard and cursing Barney Stinson for ever getting on a plane. For leaving her with way too much memory, so much that even in her mind he’s real and hard and hot enough that just the memory of his voice whispering dirty things in her ear is enough to send her spinning.
She wants the wasted time back, she wants him back, she wants her routine back. And something tells her that because she had to go and fall in love with him, Barney Stinson’s shot her routine all to hell.
Damn him.
~
Fandom/Pairing: HIMYM, Barney/Robin
Rating: R, smexxiness
Disclaimer: Sadly, I own nothing.
WC: 1,900
Summary: Even when he's away on a shady business trip, Barney can still send Robin into a flustered tailspin.
Author’s Note: I have not written any honest-to-goodness BrOTP in ages! This was fun. Fits either post-finale as a stand-alone, or current events in the RP… your call!
Friday Morning Sabotage
Robin Scherbatsky has a routine.
At two o’clock in the morning, she goes to the all-night diner down the street, buys a coffee, and hails a cab. Sometimes she tells the cab driver why she’s going to the only television studio above 90th on the East Side. Sometimes she pretends that she’s still a reporter instead of a morning show host. Other times she proudly tells the driver about Come On, Get Up, New York. It depends on her mood. Either way, for some reason, she’s usually chatty.
At 2:30, she sits in a makeup chair with coffee and a newspaper. Marcie sweeps a makeup brush over her eyes and cheeks while she talks about her fifteen-year-old son and lazy-no-good boyfriend, and Robin nods politely as she flips through the metro news.
At 3:00, she sifts through index cards with interview questions in her dressing room and gets into wardrobe. At 3:30, she drops by guests’ dressing rooms to say hello. At 3:50, she has a meeting to fight off any particularly inane morning-show ideas with Ray, the head producer, and her co-host, and by 3:55, she’s sitting in her chair on set, waiting for the taping to begin. At 3:57, she lets Marcie redo her lipstick, and at 4:00, she braces herself for the usual on-set disaster that happens the moment the On Air lights go on.
Once the disaster was a toucan, which belonged to that morning’s guest from the Bronx Zoo, and got free and flew around the studio for thirty minutes before caught. Once her chair broke the second she leaned slightly backward, so that any audience who happened to be watching at home saw her legs fly up over her head the second it cut from commercial. And once, every light in the studio went out the moment she went off the TelePrompTer and ad-libbed “we have our best show ever for you today!”
The disaster was obviously her least favorite part, but the routine was like clockwork, and within a few weeks of working on Come On, Get Up, New York, Robin came to expect it.
This Friday morning, Robin’s routine was entirely sabotaged by Barney Stinson.
And the worst part was, he wasn’t even in the city. Or the state. Or the country. For all she knew, he was six feet under somewhere on the outskirts of Tokyo, shady GNB business dealings gone entirely wrong, seven bullets lodged right next to that stupid extra awesome gland of his.
Of course, there was always the small possibility that he was just off getting a lap dance at a club by the airport, drowning in scotch and women, grinning like a mad fool for pulling off the greatest escape from coupledom ever accomplished. But somehow she trusted him when he looked at her with regret drenching his voice and said that this was GNB, and he had to do it.
On this particular Friday morning at two o’clock, Robin throws her arm out at a passing cab, balancing her coffee, checking her wallet for cash. She tells the driver the address of the studio. She takes a breath and settles back into the seat.
She hasn’t slept in two days. Hasn’t let herself. And now, with the cabbie talking softly on his cell phone, traffic drifting slowly along even at this hour, her eyes begin to droop. The cabbie’s saying something, but she doesn’t feel like talking. Her mind begins to wander.
“Miss me?” Barney’s voice whispers in her ear, his breath hot on her cheek. His fingers trail over her knee, delicately pulling her leg toward him to spread them a little wider. She nods. “Miss me even though it’s only been six days?” he teases, and his lips are on the skin under her ear, his tongue gently tasting, and she shivers. His fingers make their way up the inside of her thigh, teasing tiny circles, and when they reach the apex of her thighs, she bites her lip. Her skirt is gathered at her hips and he pushes the damp fabric of her panties aside. “You do miss me,” he whispers, husky, and his fingers dip inside her, wet and hot, stroking hard inside and then up, and she jerks with a moan so suddenly that there’s coffee all over the seat and Barney’s disappeared and the cab driver is yelling at her in what she can only guess is very angry Arabic.
Robin sits upright with cheeks flushing as the cab driver pulls over and waves his arms at her, pointing out the vaccuumed floors and gleaming seats and demanding an extra cleaning fee from her. Then he kicks her out of the cab.
She doesn’t have any more money with her, and she’s only halfway to the studio, so she walks the rest of the way in the rain. Her new shoes have rubbed a blister on her heel, and her hair is completely soaked, and it’s only thirty minutes until showtime by the time she swipes her security pass at the door.
She forgoes the extra coffee and the newspaper, just quickly jumps into Marcie’s hair-and-makeup chair, and lets the older woman go to work on her. Marcie makes her take off her wet clothes and puts her in a robe, then tut tuts and dries and fluffs and adds gel and mousse and detangler, and by the time she’s begun Robin’s makeup, Robin can’t pay attention anymore.
Barney’s standing in the doorway of the hair-and-makeup room with his arms crossed, leaning against the frame and smirking at her. “Let yourself get all wet,” he says with a shake of his head, clicking his tongue. “Tsk.” He looks around the tiny room, disapproving, and plays with his tie when his eyes meet hers again. “If I were your boss, I’d have to make sure that never happened again.”
And how would that go, she wonders silently, but she doesn’t have to say the words because he’s locking into her gaze and the corner of his mouth turns up into a dangerous smile. “I’d haul you into my office and pound out a few ground rules.” Then he’s striding toward her and she doesn’t have time to point how how cliché that innuendo is because he’s leaning over and his hand is in her robe and he’s got her nipple between his fingers, cupping her breast firmly. She’s about to shout that Marcie’s still in the room, but then it’s just them and he pinches her nipple lightly. A cry halts in her throat as he takes her other hand, pressing it to his groin. “And if I were your boss, I’d make sure you never took your mind off this during the entire broadcast.”
He drops his head and kisses her throat, his thumb flicking over her nipple and sliding down her side, hooking under her thigh. The robe drops open but she can’t think or breathe because he’s painfully hard in her hand and his lips on her throat are scorching and she doesn’t care if Marcie is or isn’t there, she wants him now.
“But I’ve got my own job,” he breathes as he kisses her mouth, and then he’s disintegrated altogether. Marcie’s adding concealer under her eyes and Robin’s got the heel of her palm pressed to her mouth. She looks over to the door and she knows it’s just some kind of torturous fantasy, but the door is swinging a little, so she pushes Marcie’s hand away and jumps up to chase maybe-him down the hall.
She winds up tangled in the footrest, smacks her head on the counter, and has to hold a compress to her head right up until 3:57, when Marcie tut tuts some more as she reapplies Robin’s lipstick.
Ray’s shooting her worried-yet-annoyed looks as they prepare to go live, and Robin’s feeling so fuzzy from the apparently-imaginary kiss that she can still feel pressed into her neck, not to mention the concussion she’s probably sporting, that she barely remembers to brace herself for the daily last-minute disaster.
They’re live in three… two… the On Air light’s on and she snaps the compress down and behind her chair and everyone’s waiting for her to speak and Barney might never be coming back.
“Good m-” Her voice breaks off.
This is it. This is a disaster. This is a complete, total disaster.
She’s known Barney Stinson for four years and she’s barely even had sex with him. Barely kissed him. Barely had a chance to ask all the questions she has for him, barely had a chance to laugh at all his ridiculous jokes and all the good ones too, barely had a chance to feel his fingers on the curve of her waist, barely had a chance to wrap her naked body around his and let him send her screaming over the moon, barely had a chance to acknowledge that she’s aching and pulsing for him and it’s not just because he’s really, really good at sex.
Barely had a chance to say I love you out loud and she’s made a disaster of everything because she’s been such a blind, stubborn idiot who took chances on everything but him.
She’s clutching the sides of her chair, the words frozen in her throat, and she hears him say, “Man up, Scherbatsky” in her ear and she finds herself telling New York to come on and get up.
Somehow she makes it through the hour, through the interviews with a local radio DJ who’s celebrating twenty years on air without missing a day of work, through the archery demonstration with an expert from Queens (she totally nails it, target practice came in handy), and the final goodbyes with a six-year-old singer with a superiority complex. Then she nearly runs off set to her dressing room because everything’s wrong and she just needs to see him but GNB’s got him in their web and god damn Tokyo-
An arm reaches out and grabs hers as she passes through the backstage area filled with lights and racks of old costumes, left over from the days when the studio functioned as a sketch comedy show.
And she’s in his arms in the dark, hidden just behind a rack of marching band costumes and boy, he kisses like no tomorrow, no tomorrow. She wants to speak, tell him to get his ass back home from Japan and forget all about GNB because this isn’t enough, this fantasy hidden somewhere backstage, but he presses her to the wall and grinds his hips against hers and the moan that escapes her lips feels real enough. “I’m gonna make you come right here, Scherbatsky,” he groans as his fingers slip into her panties and find her still wet and trembling. “Gonna make you feel every inch of it, make you beg for it…”
She can’t hear him any more because he’s stroking her, pounding into her with his fingers and she’s melting into the wall, a whistling scream escaping her throat, and his mouth is on hers as she shatters and comes around his fingers.
When the janitor spots her behind the lights and costumes a few minutes later, she’s sunk down on the floor with her knees up, still breathing hard and cursing Barney Stinson for ever getting on a plane. For leaving her with way too much memory, so much that even in her mind he’s real and hard and hot enough that just the memory of his voice whispering dirty things in her ear is enough to send her spinning.
She wants the wasted time back, she wants him back, she wants her routine back. And something tells her that because she had to go and fall in love with him, Barney Stinson’s shot her routine all to hell.
Damn him.
~