Fic: Duck and Cover
OK, so this is possibly definitely the darkest thing I've ever written. Prompt from smthwallflower.
Title: Duck and Cover
Fandom: HIMYM
Pairing: Barney/Robin
Rating: R
Wordcount: 2820
Warnings: language, violence, dark themes, sexual references, character death
Summary: She's not Canadian, she's not a former pop star, and her name isn't Robin Scherbatsky. She's a spy.
There are days when the woman called Robin Scherbatsky doesn’t think that she’s a terribly good spy.
She was sent in 2005 to infiltrate a group of four friends. She’s still not entirely sure why - probably something to do with Barney Stinson’s job. Anyway, she worked her way into Ted’s heart almost immediately, but he went and fucked it up by being the first date no woman could accept.
Then she decided that his infatuation could help. She went through Lily. Sweet, innocent Lily, so desperate for female company after nine years of hanging out with guys.
Robin liked Lily. She liked Marshall.
She liked Ted, too - he was fun and nice and good in bed. But she never loved him. Whenever she thought she might, she just reminded herself that he wasn’t in love with her, but with her persona. Robin Scherbatsky. The most awesome girl he’d ever met.
Barney, though - Barney she didn’t like the look of. He was too shifty. He felt like a persona, like two spies working against each other. Sometimes she wondered if he was a spy, if they were working the same case. But she did a background check, and either he had a hell of an organization backing him, or his paper trail was real.
Nope, that was just Barney Stinson, being himself. False. Doing for his own little emotional sphere what she did to make a living. Hiding. Lying. Always distant, never letting anyone in.
She pretended to like him, because Robin would. But he creeped the fuck out of her.
* * *
That was another thing that made her not-a-very-good spy: her persona. It’s one thing to come up with this amazing woman and play the role, but it’s quite another to maintain it for five years with no breaks.
Robin Sparkles cemented her place in the group, there’s no doubt about that. And she was fond of the touch that Robin’s dad raised her as a boy, although she secretly suspected that came from reading too many trashy romance novels when she was younger (she was forced to read them under the covers, now - Robin Scherbatsky would never be caught dead with a copy of Wild at Heart).
But there were other things, little tells that came and went. The giggling. The foods she liked and didn’t like - she adored lasagna, for one thing. Even the Canadian thing had been due to an imperfection in her American accent (God, how she wished she hadn’t said she was from Canada. The jokes were getting really old). Robin’s ambition.
Because of what profession had been chosen for Robin, it was important to keep her on a low profile, and HR seemed inhumanly good at finding the crappiest little shows that no one with half a brain cell would ever watch for her to be on. It’s entirely possible that the networks were bribed to keep them on the air.
Sometimes she felt bad for Robin. Robin Scherbatsky wanted to travel and see the world, but she would never leave New York.
She, herself, had traveled. She spoke French, Spanish, Russian, Mandarin, and Japanese flawlessly, although she was probably a bit rusty.
Sometimes she wondered if her group of friends would like her. The real her, not Robin. But the point was moot - they would never meet the real her, be too distracted by the fact that she’d constantly lied to them for the past five years to care to. Besides, she wasn’t sure that she liked herself, let alone anyone else.
* * *
She experienced a wobble when she slept with Barney.
The powers that be told her to, told her that it was imperative that she get close to him. Of course, they didn’t mean sex - sex was the one thing guaranteed to drive Barney Stinson away. But they spent more time together, after she broke up with Ted. He propositioned her a few times, but she always turned him down. Instead they went to play laser tag, or sometimes she’d take him to the gun range.
Barney was comfortable around guns. She, personally, preferred horseback riding.
No, the sex had just happened. She’d decided that Robin needed a bit more vulnerability, so she called up Frank, who was a nice guy and all, but was never the kind of guy that Robin Scherbatsky would fall for. So, that happened.
And then Barney found her alone at the bar, and she spilled crocodile tears. He genuinely surprised her by comforting her, telling her that she was awesome. Perhaps she was a really good spy after all, if she convinced someone she didn’t even like very much that she was the most awesome woman on the planet.
And then she took him home, and she slept with him. It was probably a bad idea - she’d gotten too caught up in what Robin would do, with not enough focus on her job. But when Ted reacted so violently to Barney, she got scared - this would all be over if she was kicked out of the group, too.
So she bit her tongue, and quietly arranged for Barney Stinson to be run over by a bus.
* * *
She was quite proud of herself for that one - definitely a check in the “Good Spy” column. The vital thing was to seriously injure Barney, but not actually kill him.
She had a friend (well, a former lover) who specialized in assassinations via moving vehicles. She asked him if it would be possible for him to run over a man without killing him.
He’d said that it was entirely possible. She decided to take the risk.
First, she arranged for Ted to be in a car accident. She knew that Barney would drop everything for his bro - there was definitely some weird homoerotic bonding going on between those two. She knew the route that would be the fastest way to get to the hospital from the Altrucell building, and when Barney would be desperate enough to cross the busy street without even looking.
The GPS chip helped enormously - she’d implanted them all when she was dating Ted, and Barney had crashed on the couch one night. It had been relatively easy to sneak up on them while they were asleep and press the little gun to their necks. It didn’t hurt more than a mosquito bite.
A lot of this depended on chance - if he’d taken a different route, she would’ve lost her chance. If she hadn’t called the ambulance the second he got hit by the bus, he might not have survived. But it went off without a hitch.
Well, except for the part where Barney fell in love with Robin.
* * *
Puzzling it out wasn’t exactly the hard part - for a perennial liar, Barney wasn’t very good at hiding what was real. And she didn’t doubt for a second that Barney’s emotions were real - why would he fake being in love with her? It would be like Robin suddenly deciding that she wanted five kids and a cat. It went against everything he had cultivated in his persona.
So, the feelings were genuine. What she was going to do about it was the hard part.
She led him on a bit, at first, the thing with the fighting especially. But she didn’t dare act.
She finally went to her superiors with her suspicions after he said “I love you”, after her relapse with Ted (it was so difficult keeping Robin oblivious, it really was). She had been granted a great deal of autonomy on this case, which she enjoyed. That was one thing she and Robin did have in common - their independent streak. So she only went to the head office when she had absolutely no idea how to proceed.
They told her that they already knew about Barney’s feelings (how?), and that she should act when the time was right. She really hated her bosses.
And, even now, she doesn’t quite know what she was thinking when she did decide to let Barney know about her feelings. She’d overheard Barney’s confession to Ted, and she thought there might be a sense of a poetic parallel if she embarked upon this one year after they’d first had sex. It made sense.
But the Mosbying didn’t work. He told her he didn’t love her after all, and then it just sort of escalated from there.
She wasn’t entirely sure whether Robin was lying or not when she confessed her feelings to Barney. She justified this gross lapse in character by deciding that Robin probably didn’t know, either.
* * *
She felt Robin slipping, slowly, away from her.
The summer had been good, she and Barney sneaking off and fucking each other every so often. She didn’t sleep with anyone else (that would jeopardize their relationship, and the last thing she wanted was to be vilified as a cheater), and was nothing but surprised when he was mostly monogamous, as well.
They talked in bed, sometimes. His arms would wrap around her, and she would think, idly, how long it had been since she’d been held (her, not Robin, obviously. Robin was held all the time, and she didn’t really like it).
“Do you love me?” he asked her once, when he was drunk and on the edge of sleep, which is probably the reason he was vulnerable enough to ask.
“Yes,” she whispered. It wasn’t really a lie. She was fairly sure that Robin loved him.
It wasn’t so bad. Robin seemed happy, and she felt happy, too.
And then the others found out, and it all went to hell. Barney seemed to have this idea of what people were supposed to do in relationships, and she didn’t want to upset him (if they had a bad break-up, it could completely ruin her mission), so she went along with it, even if she knew that Robin would put her foot down. She even goes so far as to become engaged to him (she wouldn’t be the first spy to abuse the sacrament of marriage to get a job done, but she’d really rather not be known as Mrs. Robin Stinson, thank you very much).
When they broke up, it was a relief, it really was.
But she lost her grip on Robin, she knew she had. She became needy and obnoxious in a way she never had been before. She’d always liked Robin, but now she doesn’t know what to do with her.
Sometimes she imagines that this is Robin rebelling against her. Robin’s fiercely independent, and she wouldn’t be controlled, even by the woman who invented her.
In a different life, she would’ve been an author, in a life where she didn’t take kung fu and major in international relations, when she didn’t join the army and didn’t take a test that showed just how flexible her morals were.
She’s rarely affected by anything, but she hated losing Robin. Robin had been a part of her, had been her, for so long. It was like seeing an old friend slipping away, turning vapid and shallow.
She was glad when she got the notice that her mission was almost over. Relief was all she felt when she received the orders to kill Barney Stinson.
* * *
She wasn’t cruel to him. Quite the opposite. She gave him the best night of his life, before she killed him.
“We haven’t really hung out,” she said to him, one night. “You know, since we broke up.”
Barney looked up over his tumbler of scotch and raised an eyebrow. “Yeah?”
“Wanna go play laser tag? There’s this new place not too far from here.”
He nodded, and they went. Then they went drinking.
She pretended to be intoxicated, although she was known to drink Russian men twice her size under the table. Barney was actually intoxicated.
When she kissed him, he kissed her back.
After they went back to his place and slept together, she went to get him a drink. She slipped a sedative in and watched him as he fell asleep beside her.
* * *
When Barney came to, he was tied to a chair in the middle of a dank, windowless room. It was all horribly cliché, but what could you do.
She stood in the corner, just out of the light. It felt strange, being here in Robin’s clothes. She didn’t wear latex catsuits or anything - she wasn’t Sydney Bristow - but she did favor black.
Barney woke up with a jerk. It took him a second to realize where he was, and he immediately began struggling against the ropes. Fat chance of him getting out. She was a navy brat, after all.
“Where the fuck am I?” he demanded, swinging his head wildly from side to side. His eyes settled upon her, although it was obvious that he couldn’t see her face. “Who are you?”
“I’m here about the files,” she said, allowing her natural hodge-podge accent to return. She didn’t move. Not yet.
He shrugged, as much as he could, given his restrictions. “What files?”
She didn’t know - she hadn’t been told. They could hold the blueprint to Doomsday, for all she knew.
“Who are you?” he asked, again, desperately.
She stepped forward.
He blinked and laughed. He slumped slightly, a little relaxed. “Flugelhorn.”
She chuckled. “This isn’t a sex game.” She put her hands on her hips, so that he could see the pistol in her hand. His eyes went wide, and he shook his head, disbelieving.
“This is some sick joke, Scherbatsky.”
“It’s not a joke,” she said, going over to him. She lifted her gun to his temple. “And I’m not Scherbatsky.”
He kept shaking his head. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down, and he was shaking, his hands were trembling.
“No. No. Fuck, it’s not… I’ve known you for… years…”
“You’ve known Robin Scherbatsky for years. You’ve never met me.” She gulped. “Hello,” she said, with none of the irony needed to pull it off.
“It was all a lie.”
“Yes.”
“You never loved me.”
“No.”
His eyes grew wet. She suddenly felt a wave of… something. Pity, perhaps. She squeezed her eyes shut momentarily, and then opened them again.
He looked down. “I love Robin.”
She took a deep breath. “I know.”
He let his head hang.
“We have the files, you know.”
He looked back up at her. At first she was taken aback by the hate, blue and flinty and pure, in his eyes. But then she saw beyond that - the complete and utter despair. It didn’t really matter what she did to him, now. He was dead inside.
She still sees them when she sleeps, sometimes.
“Good for you,” he said, bitterly.
Suddenly, she wondered what was in the files, if it was worth killing for. If it was for good or for evil. If she was doing the right thing.
She pressed the gun harder against his head, and he just stared into her eyes. She wondered how she looked to him. Like an angel of death, probably, wearing his lover’s face.
Somewhere, deep inside her, Robin Scherbatsky was dying.
She blew his brains out and walked away.
* * *
The four of them went into mourning.
None of them knew that she’d killed him. The company said that it was a terrorist attack. They had the decency - or the balls - to claim that Barney had died a hero, a martyr to truth, justice, and the American way.
She was quiet, distant, and she knew that they noticed it. She imagined that they whispered about her behind her back, saying that she’d still been in love with him, and other sentimental things like that. They’d call it a tragedy.
It was a few months before she was deployed elsewhere. She told them that she had gotten a job in Morocco (technically it was Cambodia, but she didn’t want them to track her).
At first they’d begged her to stay, that they couldn’t lose another friend.
“I just… I can’t stay in New York anymore,” she said. And they seemed to understand.
So she packed up and moved on. She never saw Ted or Lily or Marshall ever again, although she occasionally sent them postcards.
* * *
People like her and people like Barney always died in the same way. They crafted these personas to hide behind, wrapping themselves up from the world. But then something would come along that they couldn’t hide from, and their armor, on which they had depended for so long, didn’t offer them one iota of protection.
When she was killed, it was by a bullet in the head, in New York City, where she’d murdered a man who’d loved her.
Perhaps there was some justice in that.
Title: Duck and Cover
Fandom: HIMYM
Pairing: Barney/Robin
Rating: R
Wordcount: 2820
Warnings: language, violence, dark themes, sexual references, character death
Summary: She's not Canadian, she's not a former pop star, and her name isn't Robin Scherbatsky. She's a spy.
There are days when the woman called Robin Scherbatsky doesn’t think that she’s a terribly good spy.
She was sent in 2005 to infiltrate a group of four friends. She’s still not entirely sure why - probably something to do with Barney Stinson’s job. Anyway, she worked her way into Ted’s heart almost immediately, but he went and fucked it up by being the first date no woman could accept.
Then she decided that his infatuation could help. She went through Lily. Sweet, innocent Lily, so desperate for female company after nine years of hanging out with guys.
Robin liked Lily. She liked Marshall.
She liked Ted, too - he was fun and nice and good in bed. But she never loved him. Whenever she thought she might, she just reminded herself that he wasn’t in love with her, but with her persona. Robin Scherbatsky. The most awesome girl he’d ever met.
Barney, though - Barney she didn’t like the look of. He was too shifty. He felt like a persona, like two spies working against each other. Sometimes she wondered if he was a spy, if they were working the same case. But she did a background check, and either he had a hell of an organization backing him, or his paper trail was real.
Nope, that was just Barney Stinson, being himself. False. Doing for his own little emotional sphere what she did to make a living. Hiding. Lying. Always distant, never letting anyone in.
She pretended to like him, because Robin would. But he creeped the fuck out of her.
* * *
That was another thing that made her not-a-very-good spy: her persona. It’s one thing to come up with this amazing woman and play the role, but it’s quite another to maintain it for five years with no breaks.
Robin Sparkles cemented her place in the group, there’s no doubt about that. And she was fond of the touch that Robin’s dad raised her as a boy, although she secretly suspected that came from reading too many trashy romance novels when she was younger (she was forced to read them under the covers, now - Robin Scherbatsky would never be caught dead with a copy of Wild at Heart).
But there were other things, little tells that came and went. The giggling. The foods she liked and didn’t like - she adored lasagna, for one thing. Even the Canadian thing had been due to an imperfection in her American accent (God, how she wished she hadn’t said she was from Canada. The jokes were getting really old). Robin’s ambition.
Because of what profession had been chosen for Robin, it was important to keep her on a low profile, and HR seemed inhumanly good at finding the crappiest little shows that no one with half a brain cell would ever watch for her to be on. It’s entirely possible that the networks were bribed to keep them on the air.
Sometimes she felt bad for Robin. Robin Scherbatsky wanted to travel and see the world, but she would never leave New York.
She, herself, had traveled. She spoke French, Spanish, Russian, Mandarin, and Japanese flawlessly, although she was probably a bit rusty.
Sometimes she wondered if her group of friends would like her. The real her, not Robin. But the point was moot - they would never meet the real her, be too distracted by the fact that she’d constantly lied to them for the past five years to care to. Besides, she wasn’t sure that she liked herself, let alone anyone else.
* * *
She experienced a wobble when she slept with Barney.
The powers that be told her to, told her that it was imperative that she get close to him. Of course, they didn’t mean sex - sex was the one thing guaranteed to drive Barney Stinson away. But they spent more time together, after she broke up with Ted. He propositioned her a few times, but she always turned him down. Instead they went to play laser tag, or sometimes she’d take him to the gun range.
Barney was comfortable around guns. She, personally, preferred horseback riding.
No, the sex had just happened. She’d decided that Robin needed a bit more vulnerability, so she called up Frank, who was a nice guy and all, but was never the kind of guy that Robin Scherbatsky would fall for. So, that happened.
And then Barney found her alone at the bar, and she spilled crocodile tears. He genuinely surprised her by comforting her, telling her that she was awesome. Perhaps she was a really good spy after all, if she convinced someone she didn’t even like very much that she was the most awesome woman on the planet.
And then she took him home, and she slept with him. It was probably a bad idea - she’d gotten too caught up in what Robin would do, with not enough focus on her job. But when Ted reacted so violently to Barney, she got scared - this would all be over if she was kicked out of the group, too.
So she bit her tongue, and quietly arranged for Barney Stinson to be run over by a bus.
* * *
She was quite proud of herself for that one - definitely a check in the “Good Spy” column. The vital thing was to seriously injure Barney, but not actually kill him.
She had a friend (well, a former lover) who specialized in assassinations via moving vehicles. She asked him if it would be possible for him to run over a man without killing him.
He’d said that it was entirely possible. She decided to take the risk.
First, she arranged for Ted to be in a car accident. She knew that Barney would drop everything for his bro - there was definitely some weird homoerotic bonding going on between those two. She knew the route that would be the fastest way to get to the hospital from the Altrucell building, and when Barney would be desperate enough to cross the busy street without even looking.
The GPS chip helped enormously - she’d implanted them all when she was dating Ted, and Barney had crashed on the couch one night. It had been relatively easy to sneak up on them while they were asleep and press the little gun to their necks. It didn’t hurt more than a mosquito bite.
A lot of this depended on chance - if he’d taken a different route, she would’ve lost her chance. If she hadn’t called the ambulance the second he got hit by the bus, he might not have survived. But it went off without a hitch.
Well, except for the part where Barney fell in love with Robin.
* * *
Puzzling it out wasn’t exactly the hard part - for a perennial liar, Barney wasn’t very good at hiding what was real. And she didn’t doubt for a second that Barney’s emotions were real - why would he fake being in love with her? It would be like Robin suddenly deciding that she wanted five kids and a cat. It went against everything he had cultivated in his persona.
So, the feelings were genuine. What she was going to do about it was the hard part.
She led him on a bit, at first, the thing with the fighting especially. But she didn’t dare act.
She finally went to her superiors with her suspicions after he said “I love you”, after her relapse with Ted (it was so difficult keeping Robin oblivious, it really was). She had been granted a great deal of autonomy on this case, which she enjoyed. That was one thing she and Robin did have in common - their independent streak. So she only went to the head office when she had absolutely no idea how to proceed.
They told her that they already knew about Barney’s feelings (how?), and that she should act when the time was right. She really hated her bosses.
And, even now, she doesn’t quite know what she was thinking when she did decide to let Barney know about her feelings. She’d overheard Barney’s confession to Ted, and she thought there might be a sense of a poetic parallel if she embarked upon this one year after they’d first had sex. It made sense.
But the Mosbying didn’t work. He told her he didn’t love her after all, and then it just sort of escalated from there.
She wasn’t entirely sure whether Robin was lying or not when she confessed her feelings to Barney. She justified this gross lapse in character by deciding that Robin probably didn’t know, either.
* * *
She felt Robin slipping, slowly, away from her.
The summer had been good, she and Barney sneaking off and fucking each other every so often. She didn’t sleep with anyone else (that would jeopardize their relationship, and the last thing she wanted was to be vilified as a cheater), and was nothing but surprised when he was mostly monogamous, as well.
They talked in bed, sometimes. His arms would wrap around her, and she would think, idly, how long it had been since she’d been held (her, not Robin, obviously. Robin was held all the time, and she didn’t really like it).
“Do you love me?” he asked her once, when he was drunk and on the edge of sleep, which is probably the reason he was vulnerable enough to ask.
“Yes,” she whispered. It wasn’t really a lie. She was fairly sure that Robin loved him.
It wasn’t so bad. Robin seemed happy, and she felt happy, too.
And then the others found out, and it all went to hell. Barney seemed to have this idea of what people were supposed to do in relationships, and she didn’t want to upset him (if they had a bad break-up, it could completely ruin her mission), so she went along with it, even if she knew that Robin would put her foot down. She even goes so far as to become engaged to him (she wouldn’t be the first spy to abuse the sacrament of marriage to get a job done, but she’d really rather not be known as Mrs. Robin Stinson, thank you very much).
When they broke up, it was a relief, it really was.
But she lost her grip on Robin, she knew she had. She became needy and obnoxious in a way she never had been before. She’d always liked Robin, but now she doesn’t know what to do with her.
Sometimes she imagines that this is Robin rebelling against her. Robin’s fiercely independent, and she wouldn’t be controlled, even by the woman who invented her.
In a different life, she would’ve been an author, in a life where she didn’t take kung fu and major in international relations, when she didn’t join the army and didn’t take a test that showed just how flexible her morals were.
She’s rarely affected by anything, but she hated losing Robin. Robin had been a part of her, had been her, for so long. It was like seeing an old friend slipping away, turning vapid and shallow.
She was glad when she got the notice that her mission was almost over. Relief was all she felt when she received the orders to kill Barney Stinson.
* * *
She wasn’t cruel to him. Quite the opposite. She gave him the best night of his life, before she killed him.
“We haven’t really hung out,” she said to him, one night. “You know, since we broke up.”
Barney looked up over his tumbler of scotch and raised an eyebrow. “Yeah?”
“Wanna go play laser tag? There’s this new place not too far from here.”
He nodded, and they went. Then they went drinking.
She pretended to be intoxicated, although she was known to drink Russian men twice her size under the table. Barney was actually intoxicated.
When she kissed him, he kissed her back.
After they went back to his place and slept together, she went to get him a drink. She slipped a sedative in and watched him as he fell asleep beside her.
* * *
When Barney came to, he was tied to a chair in the middle of a dank, windowless room. It was all horribly cliché, but what could you do.
She stood in the corner, just out of the light. It felt strange, being here in Robin’s clothes. She didn’t wear latex catsuits or anything - she wasn’t Sydney Bristow - but she did favor black.
Barney woke up with a jerk. It took him a second to realize where he was, and he immediately began struggling against the ropes. Fat chance of him getting out. She was a navy brat, after all.
“Where the fuck am I?” he demanded, swinging his head wildly from side to side. His eyes settled upon her, although it was obvious that he couldn’t see her face. “Who are you?”
“I’m here about the files,” she said, allowing her natural hodge-podge accent to return. She didn’t move. Not yet.
He shrugged, as much as he could, given his restrictions. “What files?”
She didn’t know - she hadn’t been told. They could hold the blueprint to Doomsday, for all she knew.
“Who are you?” he asked, again, desperately.
She stepped forward.
He blinked and laughed. He slumped slightly, a little relaxed. “Flugelhorn.”
She chuckled. “This isn’t a sex game.” She put her hands on her hips, so that he could see the pistol in her hand. His eyes went wide, and he shook his head, disbelieving.
“This is some sick joke, Scherbatsky.”
“It’s not a joke,” she said, going over to him. She lifted her gun to his temple. “And I’m not Scherbatsky.”
He kept shaking his head. His Adam’s apple bobbed up and down, and he was shaking, his hands were trembling.
“No. No. Fuck, it’s not… I’ve known you for… years…”
“You’ve known Robin Scherbatsky for years. You’ve never met me.” She gulped. “Hello,” she said, with none of the irony needed to pull it off.
“It was all a lie.”
“Yes.”
“You never loved me.”
“No.”
His eyes grew wet. She suddenly felt a wave of… something. Pity, perhaps. She squeezed her eyes shut momentarily, and then opened them again.
He looked down. “I love Robin.”
She took a deep breath. “I know.”
He let his head hang.
“We have the files, you know.”
He looked back up at her. At first she was taken aback by the hate, blue and flinty and pure, in his eyes. But then she saw beyond that - the complete and utter despair. It didn’t really matter what she did to him, now. He was dead inside.
She still sees them when she sleeps, sometimes.
“Good for you,” he said, bitterly.
Suddenly, she wondered what was in the files, if it was worth killing for. If it was for good or for evil. If she was doing the right thing.
She pressed the gun harder against his head, and he just stared into her eyes. She wondered how she looked to him. Like an angel of death, probably, wearing his lover’s face.
Somewhere, deep inside her, Robin Scherbatsky was dying.
She blew his brains out and walked away.
* * *
The four of them went into mourning.
None of them knew that she’d killed him. The company said that it was a terrorist attack. They had the decency - or the balls - to claim that Barney had died a hero, a martyr to truth, justice, and the American way.
She was quiet, distant, and she knew that they noticed it. She imagined that they whispered about her behind her back, saying that she’d still been in love with him, and other sentimental things like that. They’d call it a tragedy.
It was a few months before she was deployed elsewhere. She told them that she had gotten a job in Morocco (technically it was Cambodia, but she didn’t want them to track her).
At first they’d begged her to stay, that they couldn’t lose another friend.
“I just… I can’t stay in New York anymore,” she said. And they seemed to understand.
So she packed up and moved on. She never saw Ted or Lily or Marshall ever again, although she occasionally sent them postcards.
* * *
People like her and people like Barney always died in the same way. They crafted these personas to hide behind, wrapping themselves up from the world. But then something would come along that they couldn’t hide from, and their armor, on which they had depended for so long, didn’t offer them one iota of protection.
When she was killed, it was by a bullet in the head, in New York City, where she’d murdered a man who’d loved her.
Perhaps there was some justice in that.