She watches Barney and she notices a million little things about him: Like the fine white laughter-lines around his eyes, fading now that the summer sun had left New York for another year. The way his blue eyes seem flat and his jokes seem forced. The way he doesn't do certain things any more and their absence seems more jarring and obvious as the weeks go by.

Robin wonders why no-one else has noticed.

They never seem to see him more than once or twice a week any more but that can be explained away - Lily and Marshall have a new life now and keep talking about babies, and she and Ted… well, that's half the problem. Robin is surprised that they see Barney at all. But then he was friends with Ted, Lily and Marshall before he was friends with her. She supposes that he doesn't want to give up that contact, no matter how painful it must be for him.

Barney never leaves McLaren's with a bimbo any more. Sure, he'll go and hit on some random girl if anyone seems to notice his abstinence, but sometimes she'll walk past the bar and overhear what he's actually saying and he's never really trying to score. Robin supposes that Barney gets his rocks off elsewhere and the thought makes ice-cubes in her belly.

Ted leans over and kisses her, a goofy smile on his face. "This is so great," he says, and out of the corner of her eye she can see that Barney's got this look, like Marshall's just given him two slaps in a row. "Robin… I'm so glad we got back together. Now you're staying in New York… You know, after Japan and everything, I really think this can work."

One moment of weakness was all it had taken. She was feeling so low and Barney was being so confusing and she'd never had time to sort out how she felt about him.

Moving in with Ted had lead to the biggest mistake she'd ever made; a relapse of epic proportions. Ted was wrong. Nothing had changed, not really. She still wanted to travel. It was just that now she'd had one sobering experience, she needed time to lick her wounds and hide in a safe place, gathering her strength.

And Ted, well, he was safe…

*--*--*

Barney was helpless in orbit around her. It was like he could feel her presence, with a sixth sense, wherever she was in the room. She was a tiny object with a disproportionate mass and so she bent the fabric of the universe around her.

He tried to pull away, to break away, but he was caught in her tractor beam.

Sometimes he closed his eyes and he imagined balling his hand into a fist and striking out, hurting Ted, hitting him again and again until his face was mashed into a bloodied pulp and there were bits of meat and bone decorating his knuckles.

Perhaps then she'd take him seriously.

He'd never lift a finger to hurt her though. Even though she'd taken his heart and ripped it right out from his chest, stomping on it with her neat, stiletto-healed feet.

He'd always known that hooking up again with Robin would be risky, but for those few, blissful days he'd honestly thought they could make it. He could make it.

Now he knew what a fool he'd been. You opened yourself up to someone and they soon realised they had the power to hurt you. Shannon had done it. Ted had done it. Now Robin was doing it and Ted was her unwitting accomplice. Because Ted didn't know what had happened between him and Robin, how intense and incredible and dangerous it had been for that too-brief time.

This had all happened to Barney before and now he could feel himself falling apart again. But this time he had friends, a job, a social structure. He couldn't reinvent himself in order to find a way to knit the broken pieces back together.

So every week he'd sit there, watching Ted and Robin, trying so hard to act normally that he'd feel a little piece of himself disintegrate. Soon there would be nothing left.