Title: Tricks
Rating/Word Count: G/ 1, 237
Pairing: Barney/Robin
Timeline: Sometime after Shelter Island—slightly AU
Summary: Barney knows how to do a lot of tricks, but there's one he's never learned.
A/N: This is my first HIMYM fic. Rough, tumble, tense changes, wrote it at work. Unbeta'd and probably cliché and a bit overdone, but it's my first foray into this fandom, I had to start somewhere. :3 Constructive crit is appreciated.

He had dozen of tricks—they ranged from fake heads and scarves out of his eyes and then there was his favorite—fire. His friends didn't really appreciate it and he didn't really get why. Fire was just like him—hot, unpredictable, and utterly beautiful. Honestly. You'd think he had burned down the apartment or set someone ablaze—to be fair, he'd only ever set that one lady on fire and it wasn't like she hadn't enjoyed it. Honestly. They could be such prudes, his friends. His tricks never seemed to impress them—even that one time he'd tried to be sweet and had pulled that dove out of his jacket for Lily. Well, that maybe hadn't gone over so well because she had freaked out—but how was he supposed to know she was afraid of birds?! There had been a lot of death glares, from all of them, more specifically Marshall who had nearly screamed as loud as Lily when he had unearthed the white feathery mess. They didn't understand.

He thought Robin, though, understood a little bit more than any of the others. She was just as vehement about the entire thing as the rest of them, at least in public—she was less so vehement about it in private. She slept in a motel, or so she said to the others, since her return from Japan. They lied, and he'd always smile that little smile about her lies to the others about it—he'd carry on about lice and bug and stores of sex in motel bathrooms that weren't necessarily true, but freaked the others out anyway. She said nothing, just watched him do whatever it was that they had come to expect from him.

And sometimes they shared a look, Robin smiling-pow- at him, while he debated some stupid pathetic point with Marshall (seriously, though, roaches were a lot fiercer than termites, nobody ever said termites would be alive after the human race was extinct, did they?) and then he'd see her smile and he'd finish debating whatever useless point he'd won and he'd smile back. And they would stay that way, sometimes, for awhile, just sort of smiling, just sort of hobbling along in an upturned, upside down carrot sort of way, and sometimes he would catch Ted staring at them, slightly incredulously. Robin didn't seem to notice—well, that was unsurprising, she hardly noticed anything—but he did and he would blatantly and pointedly ignore the stares. Ted had no idea what was going on.

He didn't know anything. He didn't know that Robin slept on the couch, and that when she was asleep, he would sneak into his own living room to watch. Watch her hair shift over her eyes in flow-y patterns, up and down motions following her easy breathing. And Ted didn't know that sometimes they drank, that sometimes Robin filled their glasses up with his expensive wine, and they'd watch cooking shows and Robin would make fun of their flinging spices and loudly pronounced declarations of aptitude and they would get drunk and happy. And he also, of course, didn't know that when they were drunk and happy on the couch that sometimes she would kiss him and hold him and they would laugh, and she tasted like purple and beautiful and everything he had ever wanted but had never let het himself have.

And there were other secrets, other things Ted didn't know, like when the wine was over and the show was gone, they would stay there, drunk and happy, and he'd kiss her, over and over again, wanting to wax poetic and sprout balloons from his ears, and then she would pull back and she would start talking about her dreams and about Japan. She talked about how the show killed her, how it was four am (and nothing good ever happened at 2am) and nobody watched, not even her best friends (and he had shifted uncomfortably, because while nightshirts were very important, he had created a hierarchy, of some sorts, and nightshirts were not at the top—Robin was) , and that she'd chased fruitless dreams and chances defined by a teleprompter, fake hair, and red lipstick, and after all that chasing and sleepless nights, it left her in the same booth, drinking the same scotch, and looking at the same walls.

She would sometimes start crying then, wondering how and why her life had taken her down this path. He held her, letting her tears soak his bare shoulder (they had lost the shirts earlier in the evening, when the wine had been also happy and not just drunk) and rubbed her shoulders, before moving up to stroke the tears from her cheeks, trying to ignore the blatantly obvious fact that she was crying in his arms and her hair was shaking. He rubbed her head and whispered pointless nothings into her ear, and she clutched him even tighter, tears still streaking ashy lines down her face, and then she would start trying to explain that they weren't the problem, her friends, and that she loved them (and his heart skipped-skipped-skipped) and she never would give them up and he made himself keep his mouth closed and she stopped crying soon enough, his hand still stroking her hair in gentle, gentle patterns. She looked up blearily, and his heart skipped-skipped-skipped, and she was sleepy-drunk now, pressing into him, and mewling that she wanted to sleep with him.

And Ted didn't know that, because if he did, now his eyes would probably be accusing, instead of just suspicious, more malicious and bitter than anything, and even if that ever happened and he ended up blurting it out, he'd play along, because he was who he was and that was his part and bit, and he would crow victory and ask for hand slaps all over, but he wouldn't tell Ted—and neither would Robin—that he had let her sleep with him. He half carried, half dragged her (he wasn't Superman, after all) to his bedroom, and they would lie there, holding each other, but nothing more. She wasn't broken, and yet he held her like she was—and he was broken, and she handled him like he wasn't, and it was what he needed, what he always had needed. It was a trick he had never learned to do for himself—of all things and all the fire and all the magic, it was something he couldn't do for himself. They would lay there, holding each other, barely breathing, and sometimes, in the middle of the night, in the gray area that hovered between sleeping and so awake you could count the threads in your sheets, she would lean forward, rest her head against his, and do the trick that he had never learned, in all his life, to do—she whispered three words he had never said in complete and honest sincerity, three words that weren't real without the magic, and she didn't even have to try.

And he would lean his head against her soft forehead, stroking her back in gentle, soothing patterns, and he would close his eyes and imagine beaches and sand and castles, but not necessarily together, and he would smile against nothing and whisper the same thing back, and it was the greatest trick, fire or no fire, that he thought he had ever learned.