Number Sixty Six (13/14)
Title: Number Sixty Six
Author: Stablergirl
Rating: MA
Pairing: Barney/Robin
Author's Notes: I am so sorry that this took me so long. Many thanks go out to roland44 for the beta work, and many thanks go out to you guys for reading and commenting all the time. I could not be writing this story without all the encouragement you've given me! Amazing group, you all are. Ok so enjoy this, and one more chapter to go!
Robin has heard that roots grow down deep into soil because it’s their nature. They grab onto rocks and mud and dirt and they hold fast with thin relentless fingers, pulling water out, soaking up the things they need to survive.
Roots grow down deep and wrap there, holding fast.
Robin Scherbatsky sits on the fire escape and smokes her cigarette, and she thinks about soaking up the things that she needs.
She knows the taste of blood - pewter, thick liquid iron, unsweetened pomegranate dripping out from beneath her skin. She knows the sound of popping bones - snapping like twigs stuck between concrete, like kernels on the stove, heating and opening up until they’re light and vulnerable and something completely different than what they’d been before. She knows the hazy swimming of vision, purple seeping in behind eyelids and drifting back and forth like the contents of a lava lamp, strangely soothing, floating amoebas creeping in and out of sight.
She knows get up.
She knows don’t cry.
She knows plenty of things.
She’s been a thousand different people and she has been drifting her whole life, rolling and wandering like tumbleweed through the empty world around her. She’s been wandering and she’s been running, she thought, away from shadowed walls and rumbling unhappy symphonies. She’s been forever escaping some kind of nightmare, tied to her past more by her trying to escape it than anything else.
She’s been Charles Scherbatsky’s daughter.
She’s been dangling from his fingers and she’s been swinging at invisible enemies for years, now.
She was a rootless, dead sort of thing. An unhappy Pinocchio, promising everyone she had lost her strings even as her father raised his hand and turned her head. Even as he pushed her forward. Even as he pulled her back.
She was in constant motion in and around this past of hers. Swatting at invisible flies. Ducking from invisible spiders. Shaking off any pinch of pain and running from any grabbing fist.
She’s been haunted by some childhood nightmare and she’s been drifting like a feather on the wind.
There is normally a restlessness to New York City that has always suited her, a constant motion that sweeps her up and lets her drift along unnoticed on air full of exhaust and floating pages of last week’s New York Times. New York City is an ant farm of a place without much personal connection, without small-town-people who pry into pasts and dig up old skeletons and air out dirty laundry on windswept laundry lines. It is a rootless existence and it is full of noise and distraction and has been perfect for her, all this time. It’s been noisy and perfect and rootless.
But tonight New York City has taken some cue it might normally ignore.
Tonight New York City has fallen into a hush, watching with held breath as Robin Scherbatsky’s life changes and her roots suddenly push down into the earth. She’s been rootless, she knows. Rootless and almost dead.
Until now.
She woke up next to Barney Stinson and things seemed different, changed, clearer than they had been the day before. Things seemed easier and she stood up to some important someone with her power in her hands, and now she feels something planted, suddenly. Some stasis. Some steady calm.
New York has gone silent and Robin feels different than she ever has before.
She looks Barney Stinson over as he reaches back behind him to slide the window closed and she feels her roots planting deep into this certain soil, and she wonders if this whole time she wasn’t running away from anything. She wonders if maybe she was running toward something, instead.
“Feel like sharing one of those?” he asks her, gesturing to the pack of cigarettes in her lap as he climbs around her and perches on a step just above where she’s sitting so that his legs end up on either side of her and she’s surrounded by him. She quirks her lips even though he’s not looking.
“Technically they’re yours, so…” and he hums as she hands him one.
She hears him light it and take a drag and she perches her elbows on his knees, casual and easy.
They breathe for a little while before anybody speaks again and the streets below them are strangely silent, no sounds from MacLaren’s, no couples fighting on the sidewalk, no thumping bass beats from some speeding Escalade. Just nothing. Quiet. She doesn’t know if things have ever in her life been this quiet.
It’s quieter here than it’s ever been.
“How are you?” Barney eventually asks and she tilts her head.
“Oddly enough, I think I’m fine.”
After that there is quiet again and nobody speaks and Robin lets her arm drift down to feel the expensive fabric of his pant-leg beneath her fingers and she tries to imagine soaking something up from that, she tries to imagine grabbing onto him, pulling the water from his skin, and she wonders if it would be a fair thing to do. She’s never really needed someone the way she might need him and she wonders in the silence if it’s right. If it’s good.
He clears his throat and pulls her from her thoughts.
“So on a scale of one to ten, how inappropriate would it be for me to express to you how hot that just was in there?” he asks, semi-serious and curious and endearing and she smiles.
“According to the world? Like nine, probably,” she responds, inhaling through her cigarette and looking up at the side of the brownstone next door as she exhales and the smoke drifts and dissipates into the world. He’s probably nodding, she figures, probably shrugging his shoulders, probably rolling his eyes, but instead of looking she just feels this expensive fabric beneath her fingers and imagines him.
“And according to Robin Scherbatsky?” he presses.
“Zero,” she answers automatically, “Zero inappropriateness, I never turn down an ogle.”
“Well then let me just say…the gun, the body, the fierce reenactment of a Saturday Lifetime Movie Event…” he sucks air in through his teeth and she chuckles lightly, “I had to clean drool off my lapel.”
She presses her fingers against him a little more solidly and she soaks something up.
She smiles.
“Glad I could be of service,” she answers quietly.
Everything here is quieter than it’s ever been.
“Are you sure you’re ok?” he asks her and it’s in a tone she recognizes from some recent midnight, from some recent mattress, from some recent bedroom and some recent nothings falling from his lips like promises. She remembers for a second the way he’d whispered good morning and she feels it seep out warm in her stomach. She feels affection, maybe. Attachment. Roots spreading out and holding on.
“I’m um…” she pauses and considers it, wonders where her father’s gone to, if he’ll be back, if she needs to worry, and she frowns in thought. “I’m in the vicinity of ok. It's like just around the corner somewhere, I think,” she tells him honestly and she feels his fingers slide across her shoulder, reassuring, brief but important and practically nothing but actually so much everything that she leans back against him.
She doesn’t think too hard on it, doesn’t fill the silence with noise, she just leans back.
He makes her lean back.
She rests her head on his shoulder and her fingers still hang down past his knees, brushing against the fabric, and she feels him hold his breath for a second. It’s a sentimental thing for her to have done, she knows, to lean on him this way, to press herself against him. She wonders if this kind of thing, this letting somebody hold her up, she wonders if it’s right.
And then he starts breathing again and her worry floats away with the smoke that she exhales.
She forgets to worry and she feels her roots press down, push down against this certain soil.
It’s quiet.
“So you told everybody, huh?” she asks and he waits to answer her, and she can see him smoking out of the corner of her eye and she feels this pinch of affection again, warm, stomach-deep.
“I didn’t say anything,” he eventually forces out. “I may have implied,” he adds, and it’s so him, so very Goliath-National-Bank-employee-on-the-witness-stand that she chuckles and shakes her head, her hair getting caught on the fabric of his collar so that he reaches up and tucks it back out of the way.
“So you told everybody, huh?” she repeats, dry and bland. He tips his head and looks at her with a twinkle in his eye and quirks his eyebrows at her, adorable. Eventually he shrugs.
“Yeah, sorry about that,” he offers and she waves him off because really it isn’t something she can feel angry over at this point. Really it was right, she thinks. “Ted told me you were up here with Charlie and I swear, Robin,” he starts, shaking his head and flicking ashes from his cigarette and she thinks for a second that maybe this has been difficult for him - watching her life happen this way. “I couldn’t handle it,” he admits. “I…just…”
She presses her hand to his knee and his voice stops short and his breathing stops short and everything is quiet and motionless.
“It’s ok,” she says softly.
He’s frozen for a long, endless moment until eventually his head drops a little and he looks down at the cigarette in his hand, at the railing beside them, away from her and careful.
Leaning back a little, turning so she can see him better, she pushes her shoulder against his playfully, trying to knock the look of heavy contemplation from his face, trying to comfort him somehow. Instead he just picks his head up and looks at her - serious and deep-souled the way he'd been some recent midnight, in some recent bedroom - and her breath pulses for a second in her lungs, her eyes blink and watch him and she doesn't move. He squints a little, the way he always does, and he looks her over.
“You are quite the woman, Robin Scherbatsky,” he tells her.
She tries to laugh but it's too much of a compliment from him, it's muttered in too gentle a tone, and she ends up just offering a half smile and shrugging her shoulders helplessly.
He nods to himself, and he looks at the cigarette in his hand, and his eyebrows quirk into a quick frown of serious thought.
"You are quite the woman," he says again, quiet, almost to himself.
His voice is gentle, soft, it’s quieter here than it’s ever been and this is loaded with other things and sometimes what he says is perfect and exactly right and she doesn’t understand how.
She doesn’t know why he’s sitting next to her but she feels herself wanting to grab on and make sure he doesn’t snap out of this and remember all of the things that are wrong about her, all of the ways that she’s hurt him in the past few weeks and all of the ways he could be living an easier life right now without her and her baggage. She wants to grab on.
She’s been this dead and rootless thing, until now.
There are piles of her past scattered all over the place and he just steps around them, easy, like they’re nothing. Like they’re molehills instead of mountains. He just steps around them and he says the right things.
“Who are you?” she asks quietly, almost rhetorical, unintentionally out loud. He doesn’t react much, and she never imagined any man this way that he is.
“Barney Stinson, Captain of All things Awesome,” he introduces, and she smokes her cigarette absentmindedly, shaking her head a little and feeling some kind of lightness in her shoulders she doesn’t remember having before. She goes back to leaning against him and her head is on his shoulder and her arms move to rest on his thighs, her hands perch on his knees, and he’s easy and calm and his body arcs forward a little, around her, wrapping and holding on in some subtle way and she forgets to worry.
“No I mean…just all of you. Ted and you and Marshall…you guys came up here tonight like you were going to challenge somebody to a duel or something…” she shakes her head because she doesn’t know what she’s trying to say, except something like thank you a million times over. She can’t touch any of this, it’s all hazy and soft like the edges of a watercolor and her world has slowed down and stopped running away from her, it seems.
“We’re your people, Robin,” Barney explains simply, “That’s what people do.”
And Robin hears some distant echoing snap of the strings of her past being cut by the scissors of these people of hers. These new good people who are nothing like her past and nothing like her nightmares and who never leave bruises behind.
Change, she guesses, happens unexpectedly.
She thinks she’s been running toward something since she was fourteen.
This.
Here.
She puts out her cigarette and then pushes it down into the metal beneath their feet and she pushes her roots down into this soil and she exhales the things that she’s been trying to escape all these years. She pushes her roots down into this certain soil. Deep and far and solid and sure.
She feels the pinch of affection.
And there's something caught in her throat like heavy gratitude that Barney Stinson, Captain of All Things Awesome, would worry over her, that he would gather up troops to come to her defense. She feels some kind of inexplicable relief wash through the blood in her veins, cleaning something out, trying hard to erase the shadows from her walls.
She’s been running toward this, here, and she’s happy, maybe.
"So, I just want to make sure about something right now," Barney starts, and he's light and easy and joking and she thinks part of what draws her to him is this ability of his to feel when something needs light and air.
He breathes out, and the sun is in him.
"Ok," she answers.
"Now that you were Lara Croft Tomb Raider in there and showed that jackass who's boss, you're not going to do something stupid like give up this boxing habit of yours, are you?" he asks her and she feels her brow furrow in wary curiosity.
"Hell no I’m not giving up boxing. This is New York City, a girl has to stay sharp," she responds. He rolls his eyes, dismissing the argument.
"I'm really less concerned with your self-defense and more concerned with getting another opportunity to see you in those little pants that you wear. You get all sweaty and angry...oh god. If I had a dime for every wet dream I've suffered on that particular subject over the past week I would be a much richer man than I am right now. I'd be Bill Gates, or Oprah."
She turns her head to look over her shoulder and she stares at him. "You'd be Oprah? Really?"
"You know what I mean," he mumbles.
“I feel like Oprah doesn’t have wet dreams, she’s rich enough to take care of that in some other way,” she informs him. He huffs a heaving sigh and she laughs, shakes her head, feels this thing like affection spreading out inside of her and pushing at her ribs, pushing at her lungs, filling her up in a new kind of way and she thinks...she wonders...
She thinks maybe feelings are supposed to happen from the inside out.
She thinks good things are supposed to press out at her ribs from the core of her and make them expand, make her feel bigger and fuller than she ever was before.
She thinks she’s supposed to grab onto these people who are good and she’s supposed to let them fill her up, maybe, from the inside.
When she was younger she learned feelings in this other way, this from-the-outside-in, fingers-wrapped-around-skin kind of way. This angry kind of way. Choking. Pressing her down and making her feel small. Pushing and pulling so she was this puppet on a string.
She’s never known a man in this way that she knows Barney, really.
Her strings feel severed and she’s Alice sitting down to tea.
She’s grown and easy.
She feels this thing like affection spreading out inside of her, warm.
And then she opens her mouth.
She says "Hey Barney?”
“Hm?” he answers, taking one last pull of his cigarette before he presses it down into the metal at their feet.
“What would happen if I fell in love with you?" and it's strange in her throat and there's air in it and a little bit of fear somewhere, but she pays that no mind and she's braver than she thought.
She feels him hold his breath.
He holds his breath, tight and still and nervous.
She waits, though, and she doesn't worry, and its only a second before he shifts a little, tilting his head, and responds, saying: "The world would probably start turning in the other direction or something," his voice matter of fact and laced with dry humor.
She chuckles, because there's truth to that.
"I thought so," she answers.
But she knows that they both know something else is true here and if anything has ever been adult-type love, like honest and soul-deep and more than just 'I love you,' it is this, them. It's whatever her falling has been the past few weeks - miles like down some rabbit hole, and it's this landing that she's doing now, with him wrapped around her, with life pushing out from inside of her like this, with her roots in this soil of his.
She's different now, and so is he she figures, and this is soul deep.
Change, she guesses, happens unexpectedly.
She thinks falling in love is actually like landing, and she doesn't hate the thought of it like she used to before. She thinks falling in love happens from the inside out, and she likes the feel of it.
She blinks heavy eyelids and enjoys the quiet.
“Do you think my dad has like grown to four times his size and is stomping around mid-town right now eating people out of their cars and climbing the empire state building?” she wonders casually, and Barney huffs out a little laugh beside her.
“Yes I do,” he answers. “I also think Ted is in the bathroom crying because he just got his period and this was all too emotional for his sensitive female condition.”
She laughs even though it’s an old joke and she feels lighter, somehow.
She feels happy, maybe.
She falls in love like this.
A breeze moves through the air around them and stirs the leaves on the trees, whistles between the buildings and brushes invisible fingers against her skin, but she doesn’t move with it. She doesn’t feel it pushing her away from him and she doesn’t feel like running, she doesn’t think of childhood things and she doesn’t wonder where her father is. She thinks that probably some parts of tonight should hurt, some things about this should press in on her and push her down, give her that feeling of needing to shake something or someone off of her and walk away, drift away on this breeze of exhaust and last week’s New York Times, feather-like, as rootless as tumbleweed.
She thinks something about this should probably hurt.
But she listens hard for the sound of twigs stuck between concrete, kernels heating on a stove, popping and opening up. She licks her lips but doesn’t taste unsweetened pomegranate or thick liquid iron. She closes her eyes and tries to imagine amoebas drifting there, all white and purple and red, but instead there’s just cool deep possibility.
She doesn’t hear a sound.
It’s quieter here than it’s ever been and she thinks that in a few weeks or a few months she maybe might forget what liquid iron even tastes like. It’s quiet and she’s happy, maybe.
She opens her eyes and blinks the city into focus.
She feels expensive fabric beneath her fingers.
“Barney?” she says, hushed.
“Hm?” he answers for a second time.
“What would happen if I fell in love with you?” she asks again, and this time Barney Stinson breathes easy and he leans down over her. He reaches out gentle and he turns her head, he looks her in the eye and his hand smoothes along her cheek, careful and never leaving bruises behind and she thinks he rebuilds something inside of her when he touches her.
He heals something inside of her like this - just with fingers against skin.
And he leans down and he presses an all-of-the-things-that-he’s-not kind of sentimental kiss against her lips and she closes her eyes and there’s deep and cool possibilities floating behind her eyelids, and she thinks this must be what summer feels like in South Carolina, it must be the taste of cherry pie on American Thanksgiving, it must be the walking-hand-in-hand-toward-sunset feeling that she’s never really understood before, that the Ted Mosby's of the world had all tried to show her before she was ready.
Barney Stinson is something warm like cherry pie and she’s something grown and easy, some Pinocchio with severed strings. Alice sitting down to tea.
She’s happy and she doesn’t worry and she doesn’t bite her tongue. She doesn’t hear twigs stuck somewhere between concrete and her heartbeat is slow, full of warmth moving from the inside out.
Barney pulls back from her and smiles, light-hearted and soul-deep, and she’s in love with him.
“I think we’d be ok,” he tells her.
She nods her head. “I thought so,” she says, and he kisses her again and she feels her arms wrap around him like roots around soil, and she holds on, and he gives her what she needs, and she thinks that somehow she's finally stumbled on something exactly right.
Chapter 14: Put cats in the coffee, and mice in the tea...