Extended Aftermath

Summary: AU season 7. When Robin is forced to go see Kevin in therapy, it's for the same yet markedly different reasons. "Life is just one extended aftermath of the day we were born." Robin has finally been forced to deal with the fallout of it all.

Note: All quotations at the start of the chapter are my own creation (so no need for those pesky disclaimers).

Warnings: This story goes into some detail about sexual and physical assault, but mostly about its aftermath. It also contains language, drug/alcohol use and other sexual content.

"The help we don't ask for is often the help we need the most."

"I'm fine."

Lily was really starting to hate that phrase. She'd always hated it, really, always thought it sounded so false. After all, when did anyone actually use that phrase sincerely? Never—people only used it when they were trying to cover up a situation that was blatantly not fine. And Robin was most definitely not fine.

It was obvious to anyone who really knew her that Robin wasn't anywhere near as fine as she pretended she was. Her smile was always just a bit too bright and her laugh just a bit too loud to be sincere. They were her fake newscaster smiles, the kind that didn't reach her eyes. The fact that she was using it on them—that she needed to use it on them at all-made Lily want to cry and scream at the same time.

Sometimes, Lily wanted to just slap her best friend for being such an idiot.

Mostly though, Lily wanted to be able to hug her tight and tell her everything was going to be fine, for real this time. But she couldn't even do that. She couldn't even comfort her best friend because her best friend wouldn't let herself be comforted. She really shouldn't have been surprised. When it came to her problems, Robin always deflected, always ignored, and always pretended. The only difference was, this time, her technique was failing miserably.

Though everyone was acting like they normally would-and in Barney's case, about ten times crazier than he normally would (Lily swore it was like the guy could only function in extremes)—but there was such an obvious underlying tension to everything they did. The only thing they had accomplished in their forced attempts at normalcy was highlighting just how wrong everything actually was.

The group was crumbling, falling apart, and she couldn't seem to do anything to stop it.

It made Lily want to tear out her hair in frustration. The thing was, Lily didn't have a lot of friends. She had the people at work she talked to or gossiped with during lunch breaks. She had her high school friend Michelle who she still occasionally called or met up with. But these weren't the kind of friends she could tell deep dark secrets to and who would tell theirs in return. They weren't the kind of friends who with stick with her though good times and bad. They weren't the kind of friends who would become her children's honorary aunts and uncles. They weren't like The Gang (as Marshall liked to call it).

Maybe that was why she'd clung to the group so hard, why she tended to be distrusting of anyone who tried to worm their way into the group, why she'd sabotaged Ted's relationships time and time again. Everything she did, she did out of love. Lily wasn't unaware of her more manipulative tendencies. She knew she sometimes skated the edges of moral boundaries when she meddled in her friends' lives. But unlike when she was a teenager, this time, all her manipulating was all for a good cause.

Like she had once told Barney, anytime she saw a confused little boy in a corner trying to eat the lefty scissors, she just had to help the poor bastard. Maybe it was the kindergarten teacher in her projecting on the gang, but she couldn't help but think of her friends as though they were her students. The fact that they had a worrying tendency to act like six year olds when it came to big emotional issues definitely didn't help.

When she saw one of her best friends about to make a big mistake in their lives, she couldn't just stand by and do nothing. She had to help them, even if they didn't want her help-hell, especially if they didn't want her help, because just like a little kid, they would stubbornly, pettily cling to their mistakes just to prove her wrong.

Robin was not fine. No one in the group was fine.

But this time, she didn't have any idea how to fix things. This time, it felt like she was the six year old in the corner chomping away on the lefty scissors because he didn't know what else to do. It was a terrible feeling. She felt stupid and weak and useless-and this must've been what Robin was feeling, but a hundred times worse (God, she was just a terrible friend).

Even though she liked to think of herself as the one who was always saving her friends from one huge mistake or another. In a lot of ways, it was her friends who had been saving her. Because she didn't have a lot of friends like them, people who saw through her masks, saw through her words and saw the real her-the one who could be petty, bitchy, shrewish and manipulative-people who loved her in spite of that. She wasn't sure where her life would be right now if she hadn't met Marshall and Ted that day at college. Maybe she would've traveled the world and become a famous artist like she'd always dreamed. Maybe she would've gotten back together with Scooter when they met up again and they were both still single. Or maybe she would've had a series of meaningless flings as she flitted from country to country (maybe even getting that lesbian experience she'd always wanted).

But she doubted she would've been half as happy as she was here, married to Marshall with a baby along the way and Ted, Barney and Robin all just one phone call away. That one summer in San Francisco has been enough to prove that. Because achieving her dreams wasn't anywhere near fulfilling without people who loved and understood you to enjoy it with. So she owed her friends a lot, and she tried to repay it by doing her best to make their lives better.

So Lily hated how Robin was pretending everything was fine, hated how everyone and everything was starting to fall apart.

Most of all, she hated how she couldn't seem to do anything to fix it.