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last01standingTitle:Saw Your Face Through the Flames
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: This is by no means mine.
Summary:Barney’s not dead, but you can’t really say the same thing about everyone else.
Author's note: So halfway through Faces Through the Veil of Smoke, I stared answering all the theories as to what was happening with really, really cracked out ideas. Then I wrote one of them. This is why you should take away my computer during finals week. (Diverges from through Faces Through the Veil of Smoke about chapter three.)
A/N 2: This is not a sequel. This is something completely different.
Saw Your Face Through the Flames
“Dead?” Barney repeats, a little surprised. “You think I’m dead?”
He hasn’t heard that one before and in his short but eventful career he’s heard a hell of a lot of them. He’s heard stuff like ‘but I’m just sleeping,’ and, ‘I need to wait for Lily’ and of course his personal favorite, ‘I can’t go until I find the one.’
Barney Stinson is a lot of thing. He is smart. He is awesome. He looks ridiculously good in a suit and he might just be that dorky little kid from the Sixth Sense all grown up, but the one thing he is definitely not is dead.
Robin Scherbatsky on the other hand...
“The disappearing thing makes it seem kind of likely,” Scherbatsky is saying. She seems distressed and Barney really, really wants to say something to make it better, but he doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t even know if the forces that will govern his bizarrely awesome life will allow him to say it.
He puts up a hand, deflecting like he always used to when Ted was around. “Please, like I don’t have better things to do besides following you around.”
She opens her mouth, closes it. She’s beautiful. Razor sharp and undeniably awesome. She’s exactly the kind of girl he would go and fall for if it wasn’t, you know, necrophilia.
He starts to say something else but suddenly Robin’s eyes go unfocused, like she can’t see his face anymore and...
Oh, fuck. Not this again. He’d thought he was getting somewhere this time.
***
Ted Mosby has always been a little bit oblivious. It was one thing to go hit on strangers at the bar. Barney Stinson is very good at hitting on random strangers in bars, but it’s something completely different to dress up like an old man and do a bit straight out of Back to the Future. But hey if that’s what the poor soul needed to move on, who’s he to deny her? Ted calls him insane but what the hell else is he supposed to do?
Ted Mosby is his best friend.
Ted Mosby was the only person in the whole world who would watch his stupid ridiculous antics and still come back the next day. He was the only person who would laugh and not notice how the ‘bimbos’ he left with never seemed to come over to meet him.
How he never called a single one of them back.
He had Marshall too, but Marshall was different. Marshall was a stay-behind just waiting for his girl to find him again. Marshall was the kid who’d crashed his car his sophomore year of college while crazy high on pot. The kid who Barney used to talk to for hours on end before Ted’s accident.
Ted used to tell Barney stories about Marshall too, used to tell him stories about Marshall the same way Marshall and Ted are telling stories about Barney to Scherbatsky right now.
See, Ted doesn’t look at him anymore. Hasn’t looked at him since that day he took the wrong cab and woke up in the hospital without a scratch on him and instead of thinking, hey, that’s just a little too lucky, he decided to propose to Stella Zinman, an ex-girlfriend three years dead.
Only he hadn’t woken up. Not at all. He’d kept going on his same daily life, continuing his never ending search for ‘the one,‘ meeting his old college roommate as the both of them put Barney Stinson out of their minds.
Denial is a given in his line of work.
Scherbatsky on the other hand, Scherbatsky is bridging the gap.
***
Shannon was the worst he’d ever had. Some people have things they need to confront before they die. People they need to see. It’s always been absolutely terrifying how many girls just need to be told that they’re special before they move on.
But Shannon, no, Shannon just needed to make things right by him.
***
A piano falls on Victoria her first day back from Germany. The first thing Barney does is pump his fist in the air and thank God because of all the girls Ted has dated through the years, proclaiming that they might be the one, Victoria is the only on Barney has ever seen as a real, viable candidate.
Then he feels terrible because this was a girl’s death he was celebrating and though Barney is a lot of things, he’s never thought of himself as that big a dick.
Then he starts laughing because, really? A piano? A piano?
Inanely, he thinks, this is something Scherbatsky would appreciate.
***
He wonders why they do this to themselves. Why is the fear of moving on runs so very, very deep.
Ted has been at the bar almost every night since his death. Same bar, same table like nothing will ever change. Barney worries about him. He tries to talk to him but Ted, being Ted refuses to hear. Him and Marshall concocting their fantasy post-mortem life.
Anything to stay in denial.
Then there’s Scherbatsky, trapping herself in the purgatory that was a shitty job with no promise of redemption.
And it’s stupid. He tries to get them to go be awesome instead of moping around. With Ted and Marshall, he gets them to suit up once. In more than a year.
Scherbatsky on the other hand, he has her high fiving and just generally being awesome after two months. Of course Barney figures she must have a pretty high baseline. Sure she’s one of his more difficult cases, but she’ll be on her way in no time.
***
He imagines telling her the truth some nights. Imagines saying, My job is to help the recently departed get past their earthly issues and move onto the next life.
She’d smirk and say, Are you telling me you see dead people?
It’s like a seventh sense. He’d confirm and when she gave him that look he’d add, the sixth sense is my well developed sense of awesome.
In retrospect that should have been his first sign.
***
Bimbo at the bar with daddy issues number two hundred. This one recently deceased due to a motorcycle accident. Her boyfriend was critical. Miss Bimbo not so much.
“He was an idiot,” Barney says, rubbing a hand over her forearm. “He didn’t know what he was missing.”
“I just—“ Miss Bimbo sobs, “Sometimes I feel like there’s no one out there who will ever love me.”
“Hey, that’s just not true.” This is the kind of thing that got him the reputation with Ted. He knows this looks like sleazy Barney Stinson looking to score. Only score is more of a relative term and not really the metaphor anyone’s looking for. “Come on. I’ve counted at least six guys giving you the eye here tonight and that’s before you get to me.”
“Really?”
“If you weren’t trashed I’d be all over you,” Barney says. And mentally amends that if she wasn’t dead he’d be all over her. She’s got reddish brown hair, long legs, green eyes and at least a C-cup. Seven. Maybe an eight if she wasn’t such a mess. “But instead I think we better just get you home.”
He slings an arm under her shoulder and wonders what the rest of them see. Wonders if there’s some cosmic force working to his benefit that won’t let the others know he’s leaving with a member of the dearly departed. Robin, Ted and Marshall are at the usual booth. None of them seem to see him.
“Thanks,” the girl says. “This is the nicest anyone’s been to me in a long time.” She leans in, kisses his cheek and then she’s gone in a flash of white light.
“Moving on five,” he mumbles to himself.
Then he turns back and walks into the bar.
He doesn’t know why he keeps returning to this little group of stay-behinds. He knows the problem. Marshall’s waiting for Lily. Ted still needs the one and Scherbatsky probably just needs to quit that piece of shit job of hers. He should be headed to sleep, finding a real girl. Something.
But instead he slides into the booth next to Scherbatsky and says, “What I miss?”
Scherbatsky looks like she’s seen a ghost.
Barney kind of hates the irony.
***
She’s everywhere he turns lately. Robin Scherbatsky haunts his day job, has panic attacks about a job she hates in the middle of the men’s room and it’s starting to drive him up the fucking wall.
Because he really likes her. He finds himself telling her things long gone. Things about James and Sam and his mom and how Ted used to be.
He looks up her obituary sitting in his office. It says things like Robin Scherbatsky, better known as the pop sensation Robin Sparkles and shot dead in a home invasion. And it hurts to see her. He tracks down a pair of music videos Sandcastles in the Sand and Let’s Go to the Mall and spends a long evening watching the on a loop and basking in the awesome.
He falls asleep with it on and that morning Scherbatsky is gliding through his apartment taking absolutely no notice of the tenant.
“Come on,” Barney whispers at her non-responsive form. “You’ve got to give me something.”
***
Three days later, he finds she’s not adverse to playing laser tag and thinks she might just be the world’s most perfect woman if she wasn’t a dead woman.
***
A guy dies changing a light bulb. He’s a complete dweeb with a pathological shyness problem, but Barney is so awesome at what he does, he teaches him confidence, the right way to wear a suit and five pick-up lines before he approaches a girl at the bar, taps her on the shoulder and disappears in a flash of white light.
Scherbatsky is watching him watch but she can’t see all the pieces.
***
It’s like he’s part of the group again. Like he has Ted back and dead or not, it’s awesome.
He finds himself spending more and more time with the group. Especially after Lily Aldrin drowns in a bizarre water-ski/sailboat collision and is eaten by a shark in San Francisco only to show up in New York.
Marshall is being pissy about making up with her after she abandoned him for years. That sort of moving on is just a part of life but Barney doesn’t tell him that. Barney just drinks his scotch and pretends he’s part of this because he wants to be here. He really does.
***
It hits him on a Thursday afternoon when Scherbatsky thinks she’s leaving her job and he really is leaving his job. She’s talking about Vancouver Canuks hockey, an aspect of Canada he cares for even less than bass fishing. But she’s got this little half smile on her face and he just thinks, wow, I really kind of love this girl.
And his brain skidders to a screeching halt.
Love. This. Girl.
***
He can’t do his job like this.
He can’t prod Ted and Victoria and Marshall and Lily into moving on because he really doesn’t want them moving on at all. He can’t prod Robin into actually accepting the fact she’s dead because the though of never seeing her again makes him feel like he’s about to vomit.
He can’t do his job like this.
He can’t do what she needs to move on.
She’s starts babbling now, babbling about seeing a ghost and going crazy and Barney feels something inside of him break. What wells up in him is raw and selfish and strangely right. Because after years on end of ghost stories and helping people reach their final destination, he figures he deserves something for himself.
So, just like he’s done with a hundred others, he cups her cheek and kisses her. She’s surprised at first and he expects her to pull back. To slap him and tell him he’s dead she can’t do this without knowing she’s got everything backwards.
He’s doing what he needs this time. What he’s wanted since he turned eighteen and this thing bulldozed his life. This isn’t the way he kisses those bimbos who need someone to tell them they’re special just once more before they move on. That was always soft and chaste, the faux promise of something starting disguised in the end of something. This isn’t that. He’s kissing Robin with the passion and need of years spilling out of him. She tastes likes scotch and vanilla and something indefinable that he wants to say is death.
And for the first time he’s happy. For the first time, this is something he might call love. This is the first time it ten years he’s felt like he’s moving forwards.
And he hopes against hope that kissing Barney Stinson isn’t what Robin needs to move on.
(end)
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: This is by no means mine.
Summary:Barney’s not dead, but you can’t really say the same thing about everyone else.
Author's note: So halfway through Faces Through the Veil of Smoke, I stared answering all the theories as to what was happening with really, really cracked out ideas. Then I wrote one of them. This is why you should take away my computer during finals week. (Diverges from through Faces Through the Veil of Smoke about chapter three.)
A/N 2: This is not a sequel. This is something completely different.
“Dead?” Barney repeats, a little surprised. “You think I’m dead?”
He hasn’t heard that one before and in his short but eventful career he’s heard a hell of a lot of them. He’s heard stuff like ‘but I’m just sleeping,’ and, ‘I need to wait for Lily’ and of course his personal favorite, ‘I can’t go until I find the one.’
Barney Stinson is a lot of thing. He is smart. He is awesome. He looks ridiculously good in a suit and he might just be that dorky little kid from the Sixth Sense all grown up, but the one thing he is definitely not is dead.
Robin Scherbatsky on the other hand...
“The disappearing thing makes it seem kind of likely,” Scherbatsky is saying. She seems distressed and Barney really, really wants to say something to make it better, but he doesn’t know what to say. He doesn’t even know if the forces that will govern his bizarrely awesome life will allow him to say it.
He puts up a hand, deflecting like he always used to when Ted was around. “Please, like I don’t have better things to do besides following you around.”
She opens her mouth, closes it. She’s beautiful. Razor sharp and undeniably awesome. She’s exactly the kind of girl he would go and fall for if it wasn’t, you know, necrophilia.
He starts to say something else but suddenly Robin’s eyes go unfocused, like she can’t see his face anymore and...
Oh, fuck. Not this again. He’d thought he was getting somewhere this time.
Ted Mosby has always been a little bit oblivious. It was one thing to go hit on strangers at the bar. Barney Stinson is very good at hitting on random strangers in bars, but it’s something completely different to dress up like an old man and do a bit straight out of Back to the Future. But hey if that’s what the poor soul needed to move on, who’s he to deny her? Ted calls him insane but what the hell else is he supposed to do?
Ted Mosby is his best friend.
Ted Mosby was the only person in the whole world who would watch his stupid ridiculous antics and still come back the next day. He was the only person who would laugh and not notice how the ‘bimbos’ he left with never seemed to come over to meet him.
How he never called a single one of them back.
He had Marshall too, but Marshall was different. Marshall was a stay-behind just waiting for his girl to find him again. Marshall was the kid who’d crashed his car his sophomore year of college while crazy high on pot. The kid who Barney used to talk to for hours on end before Ted’s accident.
Ted used to tell Barney stories about Marshall too, used to tell him stories about Marshall the same way Marshall and Ted are telling stories about Barney to Scherbatsky right now.
See, Ted doesn’t look at him anymore. Hasn’t looked at him since that day he took the wrong cab and woke up in the hospital without a scratch on him and instead of thinking, hey, that’s just a little too lucky, he decided to propose to Stella Zinman, an ex-girlfriend three years dead.
Only he hadn’t woken up. Not at all. He’d kept going on his same daily life, continuing his never ending search for ‘the one,‘ meeting his old college roommate as the both of them put Barney Stinson out of their minds.
Denial is a given in his line of work.
Scherbatsky on the other hand, Scherbatsky is bridging the gap.
Shannon was the worst he’d ever had. Some people have things they need to confront before they die. People they need to see. It’s always been absolutely terrifying how many girls just need to be told that they’re special before they move on.
But Shannon, no, Shannon just needed to make things right by him.
A piano falls on Victoria her first day back from Germany. The first thing Barney does is pump his fist in the air and thank God because of all the girls Ted has dated through the years, proclaiming that they might be the one, Victoria is the only on Barney has ever seen as a real, viable candidate.
Then he feels terrible because this was a girl’s death he was celebrating and though Barney is a lot of things, he’s never thought of himself as that big a dick.
Then he starts laughing because, really? A piano? A piano?
Inanely, he thinks, this is something Scherbatsky would appreciate.
He wonders why they do this to themselves. Why is the fear of moving on runs so very, very deep.
Ted has been at the bar almost every night since his death. Same bar, same table like nothing will ever change. Barney worries about him. He tries to talk to him but Ted, being Ted refuses to hear. Him and Marshall concocting their fantasy post-mortem life.
Anything to stay in denial.
Then there’s Scherbatsky, trapping herself in the purgatory that was a shitty job with no promise of redemption.
And it’s stupid. He tries to get them to go be awesome instead of moping around. With Ted and Marshall, he gets them to suit up once. In more than a year.
Scherbatsky on the other hand, he has her high fiving and just generally being awesome after two months. Of course Barney figures she must have a pretty high baseline. Sure she’s one of his more difficult cases, but she’ll be on her way in no time.
He imagines telling her the truth some nights. Imagines saying, My job is to help the recently departed get past their earthly issues and move onto the next life.
She’d smirk and say, Are you telling me you see dead people?
It’s like a seventh sense. He’d confirm and when she gave him that look he’d add, the sixth sense is my well developed sense of awesome.
In retrospect that should have been his first sign.
Bimbo at the bar with daddy issues number two hundred. This one recently deceased due to a motorcycle accident. Her boyfriend was critical. Miss Bimbo not so much.
“He was an idiot,” Barney says, rubbing a hand over her forearm. “He didn’t know what he was missing.”
“I just—“ Miss Bimbo sobs, “Sometimes I feel like there’s no one out there who will ever love me.”
“Hey, that’s just not true.” This is the kind of thing that got him the reputation with Ted. He knows this looks like sleazy Barney Stinson looking to score. Only score is more of a relative term and not really the metaphor anyone’s looking for. “Come on. I’ve counted at least six guys giving you the eye here tonight and that’s before you get to me.”
“Really?”
“If you weren’t trashed I’d be all over you,” Barney says. And mentally amends that if she wasn’t dead he’d be all over her. She’s got reddish brown hair, long legs, green eyes and at least a C-cup. Seven. Maybe an eight if she wasn’t such a mess. “But instead I think we better just get you home.”
He slings an arm under her shoulder and wonders what the rest of them see. Wonders if there’s some cosmic force working to his benefit that won’t let the others know he’s leaving with a member of the dearly departed. Robin, Ted and Marshall are at the usual booth. None of them seem to see him.
“Thanks,” the girl says. “This is the nicest anyone’s been to me in a long time.” She leans in, kisses his cheek and then she’s gone in a flash of white light.
“Moving on five,” he mumbles to himself.
Then he turns back and walks into the bar.
He doesn’t know why he keeps returning to this little group of stay-behinds. He knows the problem. Marshall’s waiting for Lily. Ted still needs the one and Scherbatsky probably just needs to quit that piece of shit job of hers. He should be headed to sleep, finding a real girl. Something.
But instead he slides into the booth next to Scherbatsky and says, “What I miss?”
Scherbatsky looks like she’s seen a ghost.
Barney kind of hates the irony.
She’s everywhere he turns lately. Robin Scherbatsky haunts his day job, has panic attacks about a job she hates in the middle of the men’s room and it’s starting to drive him up the fucking wall.
Because he really likes her. He finds himself telling her things long gone. Things about James and Sam and his mom and how Ted used to be.
He looks up her obituary sitting in his office. It says things like Robin Scherbatsky, better known as the pop sensation Robin Sparkles and shot dead in a home invasion. And it hurts to see her. He tracks down a pair of music videos Sandcastles in the Sand and Let’s Go to the Mall and spends a long evening watching the on a loop and basking in the awesome.
He falls asleep with it on and that morning Scherbatsky is gliding through his apartment taking absolutely no notice of the tenant.
“Come on,” Barney whispers at her non-responsive form. “You’ve got to give me something.”
Three days later, he finds she’s not adverse to playing laser tag and thinks she might just be the world’s most perfect woman if she wasn’t a dead woman.
A guy dies changing a light bulb. He’s a complete dweeb with a pathological shyness problem, but Barney is so awesome at what he does, he teaches him confidence, the right way to wear a suit and five pick-up lines before he approaches a girl at the bar, taps her on the shoulder and disappears in a flash of white light.
Scherbatsky is watching him watch but she can’t see all the pieces.
It’s like he’s part of the group again. Like he has Ted back and dead or not, it’s awesome.
He finds himself spending more and more time with the group. Especially after Lily Aldrin drowns in a bizarre water-ski/sailboat collision and is eaten by a shark in San Francisco only to show up in New York.
Marshall is being pissy about making up with her after she abandoned him for years. That sort of moving on is just a part of life but Barney doesn’t tell him that. Barney just drinks his scotch and pretends he’s part of this because he wants to be here. He really does.
It hits him on a Thursday afternoon when Scherbatsky thinks she’s leaving her job and he really is leaving his job. She’s talking about Vancouver Canuks hockey, an aspect of Canada he cares for even less than bass fishing. But she’s got this little half smile on her face and he just thinks, wow, I really kind of love this girl.
And his brain skidders to a screeching halt.
Love. This. Girl.
He can’t do his job like this.
He can’t prod Ted and Victoria and Marshall and Lily into moving on because he really doesn’t want them moving on at all. He can’t prod Robin into actually accepting the fact she’s dead because the though of never seeing her again makes him feel like he’s about to vomit.
He can’t do his job like this.
He can’t do what she needs to move on.
She’s starts babbling now, babbling about seeing a ghost and going crazy and Barney feels something inside of him break. What wells up in him is raw and selfish and strangely right. Because after years on end of ghost stories and helping people reach their final destination, he figures he deserves something for himself.
So, just like he’s done with a hundred others, he cups her cheek and kisses her. She’s surprised at first and he expects her to pull back. To slap him and tell him he’s dead she can’t do this without knowing she’s got everything backwards.
He’s doing what he needs this time. What he’s wanted since he turned eighteen and this thing bulldozed his life. This isn’t the way he kisses those bimbos who need someone to tell them they’re special just once more before they move on. That was always soft and chaste, the faux promise of something starting disguised in the end of something. This isn’t that. He’s kissing Robin with the passion and need of years spilling out of him. She tastes likes scotch and vanilla and something indefinable that he wants to say is death.
And for the first time he’s happy. For the first time, this is something he might call love. This is the first time it ten years he’s felt like he’s moving forwards.
And he hopes against hope that kissing Barney Stinson isn’t what Robin needs to move on.
(end)
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13/5/09 15:58 (UTC)(no subject)
13/5/09 16:27 (UTC)(I feel like this could possibly be the angstyist crack fic ever written. Or alternately, the crackiest angst fic...)