Disclaimer: Don't own, don't sue
A/N: This story kind of took on a life of its own 800 words in. I apologize in advance. Title from a Wikipedian philosophy. Future!Fic, established Barney/Robin.
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Nothing good happens at the mall.
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Lily uses her birthday as guilt-trip fodder to convince Robin that all she wants is a trip to the mall. "Please! C'mon, you owe me a cinnabon." Lily's particular brand of adorability is too much to be denied, so Robin finds herself shouldering her bag—sub-nosed 38 police special, once again found, and stowed away—and following Lily out the door.
Lily's jittery in the cab, talking a mile a minute about nothing Robin can really latch on to before she launches into a series of questions about Robin. "So, how are things?" There's one-too-many extra o's attached to the 'so' and something inside of Robin is sounding the warning bells. "Okay." It sounds more like a question than it has any right to, and Lily makes an impatient noise in the back of her throat. "Just okay?"
"Um, yeah. Phil, the station manager's been talking to me about moving up to the five o'clock morning show—"
"Oh, you're still on that thing?"
"Going on two years now Lily. Seriously, you haven't even TiVo'd it? Once?"
Lily doesn't seem to hear any of that though because she brushes it all to the side and pursues her own line of questioning. The woman should be a PI or something. "How are things with Barney?" The warning bells are louder now. Hatches are being batten down. Robin shifts in her seat. She feels a little like she's walking blindfolded into a trap.
"Same as always."
"You two crazy kids still painting the town red? Hm? Still living the vida loca?" Tornado sirens are going off inside Robin's head. Lily's referencing Ricky Martin songs in relation to her relationship, nothing good can come of this. The last time something like this happened (three months ago, with an Enrique Iglesias reference) Lily was trying to talk to them about moving in together.
Luckily, the cab pulls over before Robin has to answer and there's a bustle in the back seat to divide the fare and they're stepping out and towards the mall (the God forsaken mall that she swore she never return to and damn, she can already hear the prattle of that song playing and—)
"Hon, your phone's ringing."
Robin almost sighs with relief when she realizes she can't actually hear the haunting melody of her one and only pop hit and reaches for her phone. It's Barney.
"S'up Scherbatsky?"
"Stop messing with my ring tone." It's a fight they've had before.
"Good day then?"
"With Lily, we're, um, at the mall."
There's clattering on the other end of the phone—she thinks Barney might have dropped his phone—and then suddenly:
"C'mon Tiffany, c'mon Tory, let's go to the mall, you won't be sorry…" She thinks she can hear Barney singing along in the background.
She hangs up without bothering to say anything else and looks at Lily, who's looking at her—all wide-eyed and eager—and Robin takes a moment to reconsider how much she actually wants to make Lily happy for her birthday, if this is what the world is asking of her.
"Did he as—I mean say something?" Lily flails her hands, her wedding band flashing in the noonday sun, her mouth twisting into something like a smile.
Robin shakes her head. "Let's—"she takes a minute to carefully consider her words. "Let's just get inside."
Lily makes a sound like 'mff' and dives for the door handle, ushering Robin inside. Robin crosses the threshold and lightening doesn't strike, the building doesn't burst into flames and Robin doesn't implode.
It's kinda disappointing.
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Malls haven't changed much since Robin was touring through them singing—they're still crowded and noisy and smell like a hundred different things every five feet—and against all odds, she feels strangely comfortable there. She's Robin Scherbatsky now, after all, no one in a New York mall is going to stop her and ask for an autograph on some article of acid-wash denim.
The last of the tension's bled out of her by the time Lily's decides on their first destination. "You know what you need, Robin? A new dress." Lily heads over to a display of cocktail dresses, pretty jewel tones and metallic patterned ones, tosses a look over her shoulder to check whether Robin's following. "Something new and pretty." Lily beams but all it does is set the warning bells off again with new vigor once Lily starts picking through the dresses, "You know what would look great on you? Something white. Or off white. An ivory maybe?" Lily's holding up a cream-colored sheath dress with gold embellishing around the neckline with a hopeful look on her face. Robin thinks she might have just literally felt the blindfold as it was just ripped off. "Oh my God! Are you trying to bride me?"
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Lily breaks like spun glass.
"Barney's going to ask you to marry him!" The words come out in a rush, smashed together to the point where the individual words might not actually exist anymore. They all still manage to hit Robin like a stack of stones.
"What?"
"I saw the ring and I thought, maybe, I could soften you up and get you off the anti-marriage bandwagon, so that when he asked you wouldn't completely shoot him down—"
Robin blinks and takes a step back, accidentally knocking into a woman going through a rack of sweaters that are marked off the original price. If it weren't for the overwhelming desire to toss her cookies, Robin would be all over that.
"—I mean, its Barney, the guy's more emotionally retarded than a child raised by anti-social wolves and I just feel like someone has to help him out and—"
Robin decides throwing up on merchandise she can't afford isn't going to help the situation any, so she clutches her purse and walks out.
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Lily finds her sitting in front of a Wetzel Pretzels sucking down lemonade, slightly salted pretzel ripped to pieces in front of her.
"Robin, you okay?"
Robin doesn't really know what she's supposed to say. Because it's Barney. Asking her to marry him. It's not a hideous thing, exactly. But at the same time: it's Barney asking her to marry him.
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They're mall-outing is effectively over by the time Lily's through trying to convince her its not a bad thing and then its back to the backseat of a cab where Lily's all nervous energy and Robin's rethinking everything from the past who know how many weeks (God, how long? How long had he had that thing? When had he even decided—?). Barney is nothing if not ominously connected to organizations of possibly nefarious natures, there's not much stopping him from getting his hands on a ring without her even knowing.
All Lily really has to tell her is that he was carrying a ring in his jacket pocket one day a week ago, but he didn't say anything when she asked him what he was planning.
Robin thinks about how finally staying the night felt like an accomplishment all those months ago. She thinks about hunting down a new laser tag place together and making fun of Ted and outings to the cigar bar and generally being their own awesome themselves, Barney and Robin, without weighing anything down with terms of commitment.
She thinks about the fact that their ratio of nights spent together to nights spent apart is pretty low—the down side getting up for work at two in the morning—and how they haven't even really started leaving things at each other's places, yet. 'He's going to ask me to marry him?' Robin doesn't even know what she's supposed to make of any of it.
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Robin's never been so grateful to have moved out of Ted's apartment as she is when she comes back to her empty apartment. Her phone vibrates in her purse and Robin doesn't even reach for it, just puts her bag down and heads to her kitchen. This feels like a case for scotch.
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She doesn't really know what tumbler she's on, but the scotch is going down easy now, so it's nowhere near early in this game.
She thinks she might be going through the five stages of grief:
Lily saw wrong. There's no ring. It's not she what she thought it was. She has her idea of what a relationship is, we have ours—ours doesn't involve rings. He's not going to ask.
What the hell is Barney thinking? I mean, really? Seriously? He's insane, there's no way he seriously—I mean, what the hell?
Maybe there is a ring. But it's not an engagement ring. It's probably left over from his man-whoring days, one of those stupid props. It's part of some scheme. C'mon, it's Barney.
What would I say? I'm going to say, what, no? I'm going to say no and everything will be over, just like with Ted. He's going to ask and I'm going to ruin it, I'm going to break this and it'll be over and it won't be like with Ted, we won't stay friends, it'll be like with Shannon and he's going to run and the group will be ruined and I'll have to go back to Canada—
He's going to ask me to marry me.
"Let's Go to the Mall" is playing somewhere in the apartment. Robin snorts, it sounds strangled.
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Robin wakes up to the sound of knocking. She's feels like she's drunken herself into the third act of a hangover.
"Scherbatsky? Robin?" She groans in the couch cushion crammed under her face and tries to escape from the pounding sound.
"I think this is what dying feels like." Robin mutters to herself. Her mouth taste like day old foot and her head is pounding. The sound of a key scrapping in the door lock sounds like iron being shaved with in a cheese grater. Robin considers smothering herself.
"I'm implementing the emergency key in order to ensure you aren't dead. You don't have any dogs to eat your body. The mess you'd leave would lose you your deposit." The door is opening and Barney's stepping in. "Whoa, looks like you had a party without me. Lame."
The door clicks shut and he slides the dead bolt into place. Robin hates the world. He clicks on the lamp on the side table, and even through her closed eyelids, the light threatens to stab clean through whatever brain tissue remains intact.
"You know, Scherbatsky, you're lucky your levels of awesome are so astoundingly high. Because freaking out in a mall over some misinformation could really damage your image."
Her brain is not about to process any of this so she settles for groaning again and willing the couch cushion to swallow her whole.
Barney laughs somewhere north of her head and Robin swears she can feel it reverberate inside her skull. The worlds falls away under her and she's being swung up—"I'm going to throw up." "Not on this suit, you're not."—and there's the smell of Barney, all after-shave and expensive suit linen, warm and soft under her cheek, and then she's been set down on what is most likely her bed.
Her jeans are being tugged off and it's the farthest thing from sexy-times when Barney rolls her on her side and tells her there's a garbage can there. Her comforter is pulled up over her (she vaguely realizes she's just been tucked in by Barney Stinson and its not even a euphuism for anything dirty). There's more rustling behind her and then the bed's dipping and Barney's sliding in besides her. "Sweet dreams, alkie." Barney drops a kiss into her hair and there's a lump in her throat (she hasn't cried in a very long time but she remembers it feeling something like this), so Robin just squeezes her eyes tight, presses her lips tight and takes the easy out: she goes to sleep.
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When she wakes up the next morning, she's kind of mortified to discover Barney really did spend the night.
She can't do this right now, not without a lot of aspirin, so she decides to tackle that issue first. A trip to the bathroom and a lot of water later, Robin crawls back into bed and nudges her feet into Barney's calves. Barney grumbles but doesn't wake up. Robin slings an arm over Barney's back and decides that if things are going to hit the fan, she might as well cling to this while she can.
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Waking up the second time is less painful than before, but Barney's lying awake besides her, so it's not by much.
"You know, I appreciate a bro who can party on a weekday like it's a weekend, but should I be looking into Betty Ford?" His arms are folded behind his head and he's staring at the ceiling.
Robin groans and pulls the comforter up over her head. This, right here, is what failing at life feels like.
"So, is this your version of handling it?" His voice is muffled through the blankets.
Robin tries to breathe through her nose. "I don't want to break up." She admits. She imagined she would feel stupider but instead all she feels is the unrelenting crush of down-feathers and her own nerves.
"What?" Barney pulls the comforter away from her. "When did that become option b?"
Barney's face is all startled befuddlement and if it weren't for how terrible this feels, Robin would laugh.
"Lily said—I mean I didn't know what I would say to that and I didn't want to make you—I mean we've never really talked about any of this. We've sorta perfected the art of avoidance, y'know? What if you asked and I said no and then you decided this wasn't going to work and—"
Barney touches her shoulder. "You wouldn't marry me?"
Robin's face falls. "I don't know. If you asked me right now, right this second, I don't know. Maybe, no, I don't—I love you." The words still come out too quick and too reckless but Barney doesn't try to talk her down from the ledge of emotional declarations. "But if you asked me right now, I don't think I could. I don't know if I ever can, but—"
Barney kisses her, quick and hard. "I wouldn't ask. I won't ask. It's not a deal breaker here, Scherbatsky."
It's not really a solution to any of this. But Barney keeps kissing her (if nothing else, they've always been good at this), and Robin wraps her hands around his shoulders and keeps him close.
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"Were you going to?" It's like poking a landmine you've already managed to sidestep, but Robin can't help herself.
"Hmm?" Barney's fingers are twisting in her hair, lazy and content.
"The ring Lily saw, what was it for?"
"You."
That lump is back in her throat and Robin doesn't know what to say. He was going to ask her to marry him.
"Why now?"
Barney shrugs. "Impulse buy. Saw it, thought of you, bought it. Wasn't really thinking."
"Do you want to?" Robin's voice is tiny, and does nothing to drown out those stupid warning bells in her head. This is dangerous territory she's straying into.
"Yeah. No. Maybe. I don't know." He drops his forehead onto her shoulder. "Can we deal with it later?"
"Yeah." Robin nods, puts her hand on to his arm where it drops around her waist. "We can do that."
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The End
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