Battleship - Chapter 8 (last)
Thanks so much to everyone for reading! This ending is kind of... shall we say, experimental? So if you haven't been reviewing so far, that's fine, but I'd really like to know your final thoughts here.
Rating: R. A few instances of stronger-than-network-TV language, and some scenes that take place in the middle of (relatively non-graphic) sex.
Pairings: Barney/Robin (of course), and Robin/Ted (since this is season 1)
Spoilers: In this chapter? Anything goes. Most of season 2, indirectly.
Length: Final word count is 18,464.
Disclaimer: I own nothing.
Life, Minus the Blue Orchestra
“I basically gave my best friend license to have sex with the girl of my dreams. I totally sabotaged myself.”
In another world, things are different.
In another world, Robin has lunch with Ted, and that lunch leads to another lunch, which leads to an actual date, which leads to sex.
Afterwards, they lie in her bed and stare at the ceiling and realize that this isn’t a possibility they want to pursue.
They talk, for a long time, about how eight months ago, when Ted thought Robin was his perfect woman, there was a lot he still didn’t know about her. And she’s great, and even now it would be so easy to fall head over heels in love with her, but there’s something about them that doesn’t quite click, that never will.
They talk about how Robin loves Ted for the way he looks at her, and no one else has ever looked at her that way, but maybe that doesn’t mean no one else ever could. What she feels with Ted is nice, and maybe once it would have been enough, but not anymore. She can already feel all the ways Ted wants to change her, and she’s not so sure she wants to change.
They talk about how they love each other, but there are lots of ways to love someone.
They stare at Robin’s ceiling, and they make a choice that saves them both a lot of heartbreak.
It’s almost six months before she falls back into bed with Barney. They’re both stubborn, and neither of them wants to make the first move. In the end, neither one is sure who started it. His brother’s in town, and they all go out dancing, which means loud music and strong drinks and sexy outfits, and Barney and Robin dance together, and they keep dancing together, getting farther and farther away from the crowd until they’re making out in a corner.
It’s not easy. They flirt and fight and break up and have fantastic makeup sex, until one day they look up and realize neither one of them has even looked at someone else in months.
Eventually, Robin gets her dream job as a foreign correspondent, and starts traveling all around the world. Sometimes Barney comes with her, and sometimes he just mysteriously shows up wherever she is, and sometimes he stays in New York and sulks about how he has no one to play laser tag with.
In another world, they never quite get around to getting married, and it’s not quite happily ever after, but they have crazy adventures together, and most of the time they’re really, really happy.
But that’s not how it happens. Robin goes to lunch with Ted, and they talk, and laugh, and she casually mentions that she and Barney broke up a while ago. Ted tells her how sorry he is, but even as he says it, he’s smiling.
A few weeks later, they all go to prom. Well, all except Barney, who claims he has a very important redhead he should be doing. Ted buys Robin a corsage, and Ted and Robin slow dance to some cheesy pop song in a high school gym, and when the song is over Ted presses a gentle kiss to her lips. It’s the prom that teenage Robin always wanted, and she loves every minute of it, even as adult Robin tries to maintain a healthy dose of cynicism.
When she and Ted finally do go to bed together, it’s… nice. Ted knows what he’s doing down there, and he loves her, and he touches her like he’s worshipping her. If a part of her wishes for the raw passion of… well, she just ignores it. And for almost a year, Ted teaches her how to be his girlfriend.
She loses her “I love you” ginity.
After ten months, they move in together, and that’s the beginning of the end. All the pieces of herself she’s had to hide from Ted - the smoking, the guns, the kung fu movies - she misses them. She doesn’t have a place anymore where she can stop being Robin-with-Ted and just be Robin. When she breaks up with him, she tells him it’s because she’s too independent, she can’t imagine sharing so much of herself with anyone.
That’s not quite true.
She just can’t imagine it with Ted.
But the breakup is hard, and it’s messy, and it takes weeks for him to get all his stuff out of her place, and every time they have to see each other it hurts. By the end of it she’s half convinced herself that relationships just aren’t worth it, that if she couldn’t make it work with Ted she should stop trying.
In the middle of all this awfulness, though, is Lily and Marshall’s wedding, and Robin finds that she can’t quite give up on love, not when the real thing is right there in front of her. By mutual agreement, she and Ted put their drama aside for the day, and when he spins her out onto the dance floor she can almost pretend that everything is okay again.
Barney sits in the corner. He promised not to hit on the bridesmaids, and for once he actually seems to be keeping his promise. She feels his eyes on her all night as she dances.
In another world, things are different. In another world, Barney walks out of Robin’s apartment at 3 AM, heads straight to MacLaren’s, and picks up the first decent-looking girl he sees. No lines, even, just, “Hi, I’m Barney, you want to go home with me?” It’s 3 AM on a Saturday night, she’s drinking alone, and Barney is hot. He doesn’t need a line. The girl’s gone before he wakes up the next day.
He goes through this same routine for several nights, short, businesslike pickups followed by a few rounds of intense sex, before he suddenly realizes that this isn’t making him feel any better. The only girl he really wants to sleep with is off doing the electric slide with Ted. Literally.
Nobody sees Barney for three weeks, and when he finally comes back to the bar, he’s different. Still suited up, still full of innuendos and high fives and rules for how to live, but somehow… different. Maybe it’s the way he won’t look Ted or Robin in the eyes. Maybe it’s the way he seems genuinely sorry for Marshall, post-breakup, willing to sit and listen while the big man blubbers on about Lily’s eyelashes. It feels like the whole table is holding its breath all night.
Some of the tension lifts when Barney excuses himself to go and hit on the brunette at the bar, but not for long. She’s not exactly Barney’s type. She’s hot, yes, but she’s dressed for comfort rather than looks, and she’s carrying a bag with a sociology textbook. They all strain to hear what he’s saying to her, but the bar is noisy, and only a few phrases make it through.
“…what are you studying?…”
“…yeah, Altrucel…”
“…ever heard of…”
They can hear laughter, genuine and frequent, completely different from the laugh Barney uses when he’s humoring one of his bimbos. The two of them talk for almost an hour, and when they eventually do leave together, Barney is definitely saying something about laser tag.
Her name is Stephanie, and they date for a year and two months. Longer than Ted and Robin, as it turns out. When Stephanie finally decides she’s tired of putting up with Barney’s insecurities and his hang-ups and his near-weekly freakouts, she very gently breaks things off, and it hurts, but it’s a good kind of hurt, like the slow burn in his throat he gets from a glass of scotch.
By the time Robin gets back from her breakup trip to Argentina and dumps her breakup boy toy, Barney’s ready for her. They start hanging out more and more after the rest of the gang has left the bar, complaining about how lame the rest of the world is. Sometimes, when he’s buzzed or just really happy, he’ll kiss her, just because he can.
No one’s surprised when they fall back into a relationship. Even better, no one doubts that Barney deserves her, this time around. Not even Barney himself.
In another world, it doesn’t matter what the future holds, because they’re Barney and Robin, and they are the two most awesome people they know.
But that’s not how it happens. Barney leaves Robin’s apartment at 3 AM and he sleeps with a girl, and then another, and another. He keeps sleeping with girls until their faces all run together and he’s lost count and he can go all night without remembering a thing the next day. He makes lists, and he plays bingo, and he writes a playbook. The schemes get wilder and the girls get hotter and the sex gets rougher.
He tells Ted everything’s okay, and gets a laser tag partner for the next three years. He tells Robin everything’s okay, and they even still hang out sometimes, go to the cigar bar together. He has hazy, Nyquil-addled memories of a Christmas spent in her bedroom with her feeding him soup.
He tells Marshall everything’s okay, and Marshall doesn’t believe him. Marshall’s just gone through his own breakup, and he can’t help but recognize the lost look in Barney’s eyes. So one day, Barney slips onto a plane and gets Marshall his girl back. After that, Marshall’s too distracted to think about Barney’s pain. Much.
On the surface, the group is pretty much the same, but with two couples Barney’s slowly getting edged out, and he lets it happen. The day Robin and Ted announce they’re moving in together, he starts looking for a new bar.
The sad part is that they don’t even seem to notice he’s not around. They just assume he’s off hooking up. And to be fair, a lot of the time he is. Barney Stinson is the master of the casual hookup.
It’s days before he hears that Robin and Ted broke up, and even then, it’s half by accident. As in, he comes to Ted and Robin’s place to plan Marshall’s bachelor party with Ted, and it turns out it’s just Robin’s place these days. He tries to be sorry, for Robin’s sake, but it’s hard when he feels like he can breathe again for the first time in months.
Even then, nothing much changes. Ted and Robin are kind of sad, and Barney’s kind of quiet, and Marshall and Lily are too wrapped up in the wedding stress to pay much attention.
At the wedding, though, Barney watches Robin dance, and he wonders.
In a thousand different worlds, a thousand different versions of Barney and Robin are finding their way to one another easily, joyfully. In this world, it’s definitely not easy, and there are moments when they’re not sure it will ever happen. They're Barney and Robin, and they're stubborn, and they're screwed up, and they're confused as all hell. But that's okay. Because they do know that whatever the future holds, this is their story, and their story will be legendary.
Rating: R. A few instances of stronger-than-network-TV language, and some scenes that take place in the middle of (relatively non-graphic) sex.
Pairings: Barney/Robin (of course), and Robin/Ted (since this is season 1)
Spoilers: In this chapter? Anything goes. Most of season 2, indirectly.
Length: Final word count is 18,464.
Disclaimer: I own nothing.
Life, Minus the Blue Orchestra
“I basically gave my best friend license to have sex with the girl of my dreams. I totally sabotaged myself.”
In another world, things are different.
In another world, Robin has lunch with Ted, and that lunch leads to another lunch, which leads to an actual date, which leads to sex.
Afterwards, they lie in her bed and stare at the ceiling and realize that this isn’t a possibility they want to pursue.
They talk, for a long time, about how eight months ago, when Ted thought Robin was his perfect woman, there was a lot he still didn’t know about her. And she’s great, and even now it would be so easy to fall head over heels in love with her, but there’s something about them that doesn’t quite click, that never will.
They talk about how Robin loves Ted for the way he looks at her, and no one else has ever looked at her that way, but maybe that doesn’t mean no one else ever could. What she feels with Ted is nice, and maybe once it would have been enough, but not anymore. She can already feel all the ways Ted wants to change her, and she’s not so sure she wants to change.
They talk about how they love each other, but there are lots of ways to love someone.
They stare at Robin’s ceiling, and they make a choice that saves them both a lot of heartbreak.
It’s almost six months before she falls back into bed with Barney. They’re both stubborn, and neither of them wants to make the first move. In the end, neither one is sure who started it. His brother’s in town, and they all go out dancing, which means loud music and strong drinks and sexy outfits, and Barney and Robin dance together, and they keep dancing together, getting farther and farther away from the crowd until they’re making out in a corner.
It’s not easy. They flirt and fight and break up and have fantastic makeup sex, until one day they look up and realize neither one of them has even looked at someone else in months.
Eventually, Robin gets her dream job as a foreign correspondent, and starts traveling all around the world. Sometimes Barney comes with her, and sometimes he just mysteriously shows up wherever she is, and sometimes he stays in New York and sulks about how he has no one to play laser tag with.
In another world, they never quite get around to getting married, and it’s not quite happily ever after, but they have crazy adventures together, and most of the time they’re really, really happy.
But that’s not how it happens. Robin goes to lunch with Ted, and they talk, and laugh, and she casually mentions that she and Barney broke up a while ago. Ted tells her how sorry he is, but even as he says it, he’s smiling.
A few weeks later, they all go to prom. Well, all except Barney, who claims he has a very important redhead he should be doing. Ted buys Robin a corsage, and Ted and Robin slow dance to some cheesy pop song in a high school gym, and when the song is over Ted presses a gentle kiss to her lips. It’s the prom that teenage Robin always wanted, and she loves every minute of it, even as adult Robin tries to maintain a healthy dose of cynicism.
When she and Ted finally do go to bed together, it’s… nice. Ted knows what he’s doing down there, and he loves her, and he touches her like he’s worshipping her. If a part of her wishes for the raw passion of… well, she just ignores it. And for almost a year, Ted teaches her how to be his girlfriend.
She loses her “I love you” ginity.
After ten months, they move in together, and that’s the beginning of the end. All the pieces of herself she’s had to hide from Ted - the smoking, the guns, the kung fu movies - she misses them. She doesn’t have a place anymore where she can stop being Robin-with-Ted and just be Robin. When she breaks up with him, she tells him it’s because she’s too independent, she can’t imagine sharing so much of herself with anyone.
That’s not quite true.
She just can’t imagine it with Ted.
But the breakup is hard, and it’s messy, and it takes weeks for him to get all his stuff out of her place, and every time they have to see each other it hurts. By the end of it she’s half convinced herself that relationships just aren’t worth it, that if she couldn’t make it work with Ted she should stop trying.
In the middle of all this awfulness, though, is Lily and Marshall’s wedding, and Robin finds that she can’t quite give up on love, not when the real thing is right there in front of her. By mutual agreement, she and Ted put their drama aside for the day, and when he spins her out onto the dance floor she can almost pretend that everything is okay again.
Barney sits in the corner. He promised not to hit on the bridesmaids, and for once he actually seems to be keeping his promise. She feels his eyes on her all night as she dances.
In another world, things are different. In another world, Barney walks out of Robin’s apartment at 3 AM, heads straight to MacLaren’s, and picks up the first decent-looking girl he sees. No lines, even, just, “Hi, I’m Barney, you want to go home with me?” It’s 3 AM on a Saturday night, she’s drinking alone, and Barney is hot. He doesn’t need a line. The girl’s gone before he wakes up the next day.
He goes through this same routine for several nights, short, businesslike pickups followed by a few rounds of intense sex, before he suddenly realizes that this isn’t making him feel any better. The only girl he really wants to sleep with is off doing the electric slide with Ted. Literally.
Nobody sees Barney for three weeks, and when he finally comes back to the bar, he’s different. Still suited up, still full of innuendos and high fives and rules for how to live, but somehow… different. Maybe it’s the way he won’t look Ted or Robin in the eyes. Maybe it’s the way he seems genuinely sorry for Marshall, post-breakup, willing to sit and listen while the big man blubbers on about Lily’s eyelashes. It feels like the whole table is holding its breath all night.
Some of the tension lifts when Barney excuses himself to go and hit on the brunette at the bar, but not for long. She’s not exactly Barney’s type. She’s hot, yes, but she’s dressed for comfort rather than looks, and she’s carrying a bag with a sociology textbook. They all strain to hear what he’s saying to her, but the bar is noisy, and only a few phrases make it through.
“…what are you studying?…”
“…yeah, Altrucel…”
“…ever heard of…”
They can hear laughter, genuine and frequent, completely different from the laugh Barney uses when he’s humoring one of his bimbos. The two of them talk for almost an hour, and when they eventually do leave together, Barney is definitely saying something about laser tag.
Her name is Stephanie, and they date for a year and two months. Longer than Ted and Robin, as it turns out. When Stephanie finally decides she’s tired of putting up with Barney’s insecurities and his hang-ups and his near-weekly freakouts, she very gently breaks things off, and it hurts, but it’s a good kind of hurt, like the slow burn in his throat he gets from a glass of scotch.
By the time Robin gets back from her breakup trip to Argentina and dumps her breakup boy toy, Barney’s ready for her. They start hanging out more and more after the rest of the gang has left the bar, complaining about how lame the rest of the world is. Sometimes, when he’s buzzed or just really happy, he’ll kiss her, just because he can.
No one’s surprised when they fall back into a relationship. Even better, no one doubts that Barney deserves her, this time around. Not even Barney himself.
In another world, it doesn’t matter what the future holds, because they’re Barney and Robin, and they are the two most awesome people they know.
But that’s not how it happens. Barney leaves Robin’s apartment at 3 AM and he sleeps with a girl, and then another, and another. He keeps sleeping with girls until their faces all run together and he’s lost count and he can go all night without remembering a thing the next day. He makes lists, and he plays bingo, and he writes a playbook. The schemes get wilder and the girls get hotter and the sex gets rougher.
He tells Ted everything’s okay, and gets a laser tag partner for the next three years. He tells Robin everything’s okay, and they even still hang out sometimes, go to the cigar bar together. He has hazy, Nyquil-addled memories of a Christmas spent in her bedroom with her feeding him soup.
He tells Marshall everything’s okay, and Marshall doesn’t believe him. Marshall’s just gone through his own breakup, and he can’t help but recognize the lost look in Barney’s eyes. So one day, Barney slips onto a plane and gets Marshall his girl back. After that, Marshall’s too distracted to think about Barney’s pain. Much.
On the surface, the group is pretty much the same, but with two couples Barney’s slowly getting edged out, and he lets it happen. The day Robin and Ted announce they’re moving in together, he starts looking for a new bar.
The sad part is that they don’t even seem to notice he’s not around. They just assume he’s off hooking up. And to be fair, a lot of the time he is. Barney Stinson is the master of the casual hookup.
It’s days before he hears that Robin and Ted broke up, and even then, it’s half by accident. As in, he comes to Ted and Robin’s place to plan Marshall’s bachelor party with Ted, and it turns out it’s just Robin’s place these days. He tries to be sorry, for Robin’s sake, but it’s hard when he feels like he can breathe again for the first time in months.
Even then, nothing much changes. Ted and Robin are kind of sad, and Barney’s kind of quiet, and Marshall and Lily are too wrapped up in the wedding stress to pay much attention.
At the wedding, though, Barney watches Robin dance, and he wonders.
In a thousand different worlds, a thousand different versions of Barney and Robin are finding their way to one another easily, joyfully. In this world, it’s definitely not easy, and there are moments when they’re not sure it will ever happen. They're Barney and Robin, and they're stubborn, and they're screwed up, and they're confused as all hell. But that's okay. Because they do know that whatever the future holds, this is their story, and their story will be legendary.