Disclaimer: I own nothing. And I've missed you, Barney and Robin.
Skinned Knee
Everything's fine until she trips and skins her knee on the stairs.
She's had a hundred skinned knees in her life. Most of them came from being on the ice. Sometimes it came from the blind carelessness she'd allowed herself as a kid.
Once when she was six, she'd skinned it while running for the bus home. Her hands broke her fall and mud went under her fingernails. Later her mother had taped her knee up with Band-Aids and kissed her temple before slipping out the door to play pool at the lounge down the street. The only reason the memory stood out was that Robin rarely saw her mother on weeknights. The orange-red lipstick left a half-kiss mark on her skin that she examined in the mirror for as long as she could until bathtime.
Years later, when she'd followed him down to the boys' locker room, Brandon DeLuca had kissed the smooth skin just above the wound she'd gotten while blocking a goal. She'd stared at him wide-eyed and panicky until he asked her if that was a stupid move and she shook her head and they kissed, two times, under flickering fluorescent lights.
(And once on the set of Space Teens, she'd attempted the splits and ended up with a bloodied knee and a ruined pair of leg warmers, but that wasn't a memory she generally associated with anything remotely positive and it didn't really bear thinking about more than necessary.)
At least a hundred skinned knees, she figures. At least a hundred.
So it doesn't mean anything that she lands another one while she's still thinking about last night, the way they sink so easily into the banter of an old married couple, accusations of idiocy and moon man language flying, and damn it his cologne had been in the air and had anything really changed, really (yes, yes, it has)?
She goes down easily, just a small clip of her boot on that step on the back cement stairs at the Worldwide News Building and she's sprawled out like a six-year-old running too fast for the school bus. Only this time there's polish on her nails to cover the dirt, and bare skin instead of schoolgirl tights that takes the brunt of the cement crash.
There's a moment before she feels the pain set in.
It's like that moment—those moments—as she's telling Barney what he should do, what girl to call, how to be a man, how to make things work. It's like that moment when it's just a girl telling her best friend that to keep the world spinning on its axis he's gotta step it up and make a fucking move already. Call that girl she knows he likes. Call that girl he smiles for. Call that girl who probably never slipped in horse crap on camera or fell for the wrong man every-single-time or almost shot a cop (on accident) at Coney Island or went sprawling, lipstick and wallet flying, over the back alley at Worldwide News for no good reason other than thinking about some guy who once loved her.
Yeah, it's like that moment where she's handing over that girl's phone number and he's got that determined look in his eye and for that space in time, she's proud of him and nothing hurts.
And then she hits the pavement, and the apartment door swings shut, and she's nose-to-asphalt, and she's listening to his footsteps getting quieter, and he's going to fall in love with someone else, and she's bleeding.
And fuck, fuck, fuck she's not going to cry, because if she didn't cry at six or thirteen or sixteen she's sure as hell not going to cry now.
And it's crazy, but for a second, she almost wants to call her mom. But it's been awhile since they've talked, and you don't call your mom when you scrape your knee. You don't get a kiss now that you pay your own bills.
So she chases down the lipstick and compact and billfold and keys and stuffs them back into her purse. She limps down the alley, her throat tight, and wraps her coat tighter around her because it's February and Canada feels like a long way away.
Wendy sees the blood when she enters the bar twenty minutes later, and Robin's sitting on a barstool with an icepack from Carl on her knee when Barney strolls through the door, his eyes finding her instantly because that's Barney and hell, he can smell weakness in a female a kilometer away.
Want me to kiss it, baby? he smirks and she swivels the stool back toward the bar and takes a drink of something that isn't hers to mask her face. It's strong. She coughs and there's a goddamned tear trickling down one cheek and of course he sees it, of course he does.
It's nothing, she says when his face betrays a whisp of panic, the whiskey's too strong.
She coughs again and throws him a what? look and they stare at each other and it's that moment again, the moment where nothing hurts.
Then he kisses his fingertip and trails it down her knee, from smooth to broken skin. He stops it there and presses the kiss gently into her skin and it hurts because it always hurts when he touches her, the good kind of pain, if there is such a thing.
You all right? he asks quietly, like he's suddenly getting it. She hates it when he gets it because then he's real and then he's vulnerable and she's vulnerable and they both know where that gets them.
Yeah, she says. Yeah, I'm all right. Just a skinned knee.
It'll heal.