The Trouble with Barney (8/9)
Title: The Trouble with Barney
Author: Stablergirl
Rating: MA
Author's Notes: OK hopefully this will ring true for these two. The chapter in which we confess our feelings. Let me know what you think.
Disclaimer: Really? I don't own them.
Chapter 8: Lucky for you, this thing isn't cocked.
Robin is deep in thought when someone breaks into their apartment and tries to steal the television.
And, apparently from the sound of it, drops it on their way out.
There are many things Robin does not know at this point in time, but one thing she does know is that she desperately needs that television for her very fragile survival. She particularly needs QVC for its over-the-top sales pitches that she imitates privately in the shower for her own entertainment, and also ESPN and its mindless chatter and newly discovered interoffice relationships.
So, she reaches into her bedside table and pulls out one of her guns, and without hesitation she takes the living room literally by storm.
“Don’t move!” she shouts and it’s almost exactly like how she’d always imagined it would be and almost exactly like that one other time when she’d walked in the door to find two jerks pilfering their shit, except the only difference is this guy isn’t taking the TV, he’s apparently taking her boots (a QVC burglar from Chelsea, perhaps, looking for a new special something to wear out on the town) and he is also not a twenty something from Harlem with a bag of weed in his back pocket and a getaway car waiting outside…
The guy, instead, is Barney.
Looking like he’s maybe wet his pants a little.
“Gah!” he cries out, holding his hands up and offering the boots to her from his sprawled out place on the floor behind the sofa. She deflates and she shakes herself because there’s no need to scare Barney away.
Barney, she thinks.
Not the guy stealing her television and by extension her peace of mind, just the guy she…loves?
The guy she’s in love with.
She actually thinks she is, and she’s not sure how it happened and she’s not sure what to do about it and she’s not sure what exactly any of it means, but she knows that if she had to pick somebody to spend a large portion of time with without killing them, she would pick Barney over literally everybody else she knows. She’s been thinking she likes him and she’s been thinking she especially likes sleeping with him and she’s been thinking a guy in a suit is a million times better than a guy wearing pretty much anything else. Laser tag and cigar bars sound better than a stroll through central park, and playing you have two minutes to rank all the chicks in MacLaren’s on a scale of one to ten starting now, go, is so much more entertaining than playing guess how many times today I thought about you and how beautiful and perfect you are.
Not that she’s not beautiful and perfect - she is - it’s just…well, anyway.
She’s been thinking about it for about fifteen minutes, and for a normal person that would probably not have been enough time to come to any conclusions, to decide anything or come to terms with anything, but this is Robin. She has a habit of making life-altering decisions in between ordering a bagel and asking for extra napkins, so fifteen minutes is really plenty and she’s decided some things, and she’s come to terms with some things.
Like that she’s in love with him. She’s in love with him. It’s gonna take a few more times before it sounds semi-normal, but, she’s pretty sure it’s fact.
She still, however, feels that nagging nervousness in the pit of her stomach because this, after all, is Barney.
This is Barney she’s talking about and this is not Ted and this entire situation has disaster written all over it. How can a woman fall in love with a playboy and expect to come out of it unscathed? She has no idea. She’s also not good at sharing herself in situations like this, like for example confessing things or propositioning someone, so she honestly has no idea how to properly broach this subject with him. She doesn’t know how to be vulnerable. She stands awkwardly, holding her gun, and she looks at him with a deflated and unsure facial expression.
He gasps for air.
“What are you doing?” she asks him and he shakes his head almost frantically.
“Nothing, nothing, I was just um, your boots were...and I didn’t see them, so I tripped and then I um…then you know you came out with the…with that…and so, I’m really sorry I wasn’t…” and as he stutters and bumbles his way through a non-explanation, all the while warily eyeing the gun at her side, she finds herself slowly grinning at him, entertained by him, smitten with him and forgiving him and thinking warm and affectionate thoughts that head in the distinctly female and Ted-like direction so that eventually - just for a MILLISECOND - she actually considers how freaking good looking and awesome their offspring would be, totally dominating the playground’s first-kiss scene, and holy shit THAT makes her go a little pale and feel a little sick…and so she interrupts his idiotic muttering.
“I don’t want to have your babies!” she barks and he goes blessedly, frighteningly silent.
She shifts on her feet and wonders if she actually just said that.
“Yeah ok,” he answers warily after a few beats of quiet, and she huffs out a breath and shakes her head at herself, pressing her free hand to her forehead.
“Sorry, I’m sorry. I just…I don’t want to get married. And I don’t want to have babies until I’m like sixty five,” she confesses in a rush and she’s not sure exactly where she’s going with this. If she had to predict what would happen next she’s pretty sure she’d say, like, oh this is the part where I jump out the window and get run over by a horse and buggy delivering freshly churned butter to the mayor. Something elaborate and embarrassing like that.
“So, then you don’t want kids at all,” Barney assumes, “cause no sane man would send his little swimmers anywhere near your area once you’re sixty five,” he tells her, shuddering and closing his eyes against even imagining it.
“I don’t know, I don’t know what I want,” she says honestly, ignoring his ageist commentary, “and I don’t like pressure. I don’t like people asking me where I see myself in ten years or where things are heading or if I prefer silver or gold jewelry,”
“Gold, obviously,” he interjects.
“It makes me jumpy,” she tells him. He just squints at her as if his brain is just now catching up and he’s realizing this is weird, because it is and she knows it is and she can hear herself saying weird things, but it’s just that…Lily is almost always right. And Robin is almost always insane. And right now she has to say all of this. She has to tell him things. She needs to tell him these things and she can’t shut herself up because it’s like the seal has been broken and she doesn’t have a choice. “I also don’t like eating by candlelight,” she admits, “I can’t see what I’m eating and it freaks me out because what if there’s a cockroach in there or somebody’s finger and you can’t even see it because it’s so freaking dark because some guy once said that was romantic, but really it’s just unsanitary. I’m not afraid of the dark or anything but I mean...Is it so weird that I like to be able to see my food?”
“Robin,” Barney says quietly, and he pushes himself up so that he’s sitting, and one knee is bent and one elbow is braced on the one knee and she’s distracted by the look of him.
She’s distracted by him. Constantly.
“What I’m…” she sighs, “I’m not any good at this at all, Barney,” she tells him. He nods carefully and she can tell by his face that he’s hearing her, clear and loud and crystal and good and listening hard instead of spouting out the titles of television shows. He’s listening hard, and she definitely knows how she feels. “I’m, um…” she starts again, and she feels her focus narrow in and she feels her face go soft and mushy and feminine and affectionate and she wonders for the millionth time how the hell any of this happened, “I’m just…” she says, but god this is hard…this is so hard to do and to say and she’s vulnerable and she’s never liked feeling that way, and this is all too impossible, “I think I’m…”
“I’m in love with you,” he interrupts.
She blinks.
“I don’t want to marry you, either, and I don’t want to have your babies," she bites her tongue and decides not to correct that little biological mixup, "and I don’t want to eat by candlelight or ask you where you see yourself in ten years. I might buy you jewelry but if I do I’m not going to ask you what you want it to look like before hand and it’s not going to be attached to a diamond ring and fifty years of the silent treatment at a messy creamed spinach and corn bread dinner table. I will not be any less awesome tomorrow, and god I hope neither will you, but I have to say this to you tonight and you have to listen, ok?” he tells her and she can’t move because it feels like he’s doing this for her. It feels like he knew exactly what she was going to say and exactly how many ways she was afraid of saying it and so he stepped up and he took hold of the reins. It feels like he’s offering to be vulnerable and to look like an idiot to make her feel ok and to make her feel comfortable or just…
And for her to say she’s grateful is an understatement.
To say he has cojones is also a serious understatement as well.
“Ok,” she says, nodding. He nods back and he visibly braces himself.
“Robin, I’m sorry about tonight and the past few days and this stupid bet,” he tells her, “and I should never have…I just, I’m not any good at this kind of thing, either, and you…” he sighs, “You totally distract me every second of every day,” he confesses, his face twisting because she can tell he thinks it sounded wrong, but it sounds perfect to her, it sounds eerily familiar, so she smiles. “And if I had to pick one woman to sleep with every night for the rest of my entire life it would be you, even when you’re sixty five and disgusting, and if I had to spend any lengthy period of time - god forbid - locked in a room with somebody, forced to talk to them” he grimaces and she chuckles quietly, “I would want to be locked in with you because I know I wouldn’t strangle you. I will gladly give up bimbos for you, and I don't have a lot of practice, but I'm pretty sure that's as close to being in love as I'll ever really get.”
God, she thinks, they’re the same. This sounds the same and that has never ever happened to her before. She has never been on the same page as any guy she’s ever dated. Never. She’s always two steps behind and they’re always two steps ahead and they ask her if she likes the name Franklin for a baby boy (Like the turtle? she would answer,) and she can never imagine finding someone else like Barney Stinson. She can’t imagine finding someone else like him and he’s exactly, she admits, what she’s looking for. She swallows and she tries to wait for him to finish.
“I don’t want to be your boyfriend, I just…” he sighs, “I want to be me, and I want you to be you, but I want us to…”
“I’m in love with you,” she whispers because she can’t stand it any longer, and now Barney Stinson is speechless. Wordless. Catch-phrase-free and staring at her open mouthed and she swears she sees something salt-water glistening in the corners of his eyes, so she says it again. She says “I’m in love with you,” adding “but if you cheat on me and break my heart I swear I will shoot you in your face,” and by the end of that he’s on his feet and he’s kissing her, and she thinks she’s laughing but it’s hard to tell because this is nothing like anything else she can ever remember.
She says “I love you” into his mouth and “I’m sorry” in between kisses.
And Barney says something like “Put the gun down and shut the hell up, Scherbatsky.”
And so, laughing, she does, and she's pretty sure this is the part where they get to have sex and the amber purification candle in her bedroom paints orange shadows on the walls and she thinks for a second that actually maybe she gets why that one guy once decided candlelight was romantic.
But she would never say so out loud.
(Chapter 9)