#robin when she hears the car story: cannot believe you’re the same guy who ran over billy hargrove in a convertible

[livwritesstuff]

Robbie is about four years old when middle child syndrome seems to well and truly sink in.

Look – Steve and Eddie are trying, but they also know that there’s also a certain level of inevitability to it. No matter how much attention she gets, no matter what they do to make sure they’re treating all three of their daughters equally, she was always going to be their middle kid and that was never going to change.

They aren’t totally sure what set Robbie off that particular afternoon, only that one second she and Moe were bickering over a puzzle and the next she was in tears, wailing about how Moe was the oldest and Hazel was the baby and Robbie would never get to be special.

“Hey,” Eddie stops her a minute later as Steve corrals an alarmed-looking Moe out into the backyard to play, “I know something we got to do with you that we didn’t with your sisters.”

And Robbie actually stops crying, lifting her head off his shoulder to look at him with those big blue eyes.

“What?” she asks, and she punctuates the question with a positively enormous sniffle.

“We got to drive you home from the hospital after you were born.”

Robbie blinks.

“Just me?”

“Just you,” Steve tells her as pulls her out of Eddie’s arms and into his own.

“And not Moe and Hazel?” she asks, eyes narrowed suspiciously as if she doesn’t believe them quite yet.

“Nope,” Eddie shook his head, “And do you remember what was special about when you were born?”

“I came early,” she tells them, because she knows.

“That’s exactly right, Bean," he nods, "You came early and you spent a whole week in the hospital until the doctors said we could take you home, and I sat in the backseat with you while Papa drove, and do you know what I remember?”

Robbie shakes her head.

“I remember Papa was driving really slow.”

“Papa always drives slow,” Robbie says, and her nose scrunches up the way it always does when she’s making fun of them (and she’s getting real good at it these days).

“Well, he was driving especially slow, and I asked him why, and you know what he said?”

“What?”

“He said precious cargo,”  he tells her, and Steve has to hide a smile in Robbie’s messy curls because he’d forgotten about that.

He’d forgotten until this moment how the early November sky had been dark and cloudy. He’d forgotten how, halfway through the drive, the sky had opened up on them, fat raindrops making loud plunks as they hit the roof of the car, and how Eddie had teased him as he eased off the highway to wait out the rainstorm, but Steve hadn’t heard a single complaint from him the whole half hour they killed sitting together in the backseat with newborn Robbie, and Steve couldn’t stop thinking about how damn happy he was.

Steve is pulled out of his thoughts as Eddie speaks again.

“You know who that precious cargo was?” he asked Robbie.

She shrugged bashfully, hiding her face in the collar of Steve’s shirt.

 “That was you, Bean,” Eddie tells her, and Robbie giggled as he poked her little belly, “That was you.”