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It was an unseasonably hot day in April, and as a result, Barney had his air conditioner cranked up to the highest setting. Or at least he had for an hour or two until it’d begun to make an odd whirring, grinding sound and clunked off. He sighed in frustration as cold air ceased to circulate around the room and heat from outside permeated into the room.
In what seemed like no time at all, the room had become humid: the hot air, creeping through the minuscule gaps under and around the windows, mixing with the remaining cool air. Barney noticed his shirt was damp under the arms. It was at this moment that Barney decided to call someone in to fix the broken air conditioner. Someone beautiful, intelligent, and well versed in the ways of Bros: Robin Scherbatsky.
“Really, Barney? Why don’t you just open a window?” Robin stepped into the now sweltering apartment and frowned at her friend.
“Please, Robin. As if I’d let the contaminated city air into my apartment.” Honestly, though, the thought hadn’t occurred to him. And if that was Robin’s grand plan, she could have easily told him on the phone instead of coming all the way over. “You just thought of that on the way up here, didn’t you?” Barney said, a slight smirk gracing his features.
“Yeah,” Robin said sounding slightly annoyed at herself. “So where is this -- as you put it -- demonic machinery?”
“Over there, by the window, near the Storm Trooper.” Barney waved vaguely in that general direction as he walked towards his kitchen area. He brought out two tumbler glasses, ice cubes, and a bottle of a scotch they both loved as Robin crouched down to examine the broken air conditioner.
“So, what’s wrong with it?” Barney asked. He dangled the glass of scotch in front of Robin, the ice cubes clinking against each other and the glass.
“Well, it’s broken --”
“Really, Scherbatsky? Oh, I hadn’t noticed.”
Standing up straight, Robin rolled her eyes at the sarcasm. Taking the glass from Barney, she gulped down a mouthful of the amber liquid before asking, “Where’s the box it came in?” As she said the word 'it', she used her glass to gesture towards the air conditioner.
“What’d you want the box for? It came already assembled.”
“It should have a spare of the part I need to get the thing working again.” It didn’t bother Robin at all that Barney had called her in to fix his air conditioner, even though Marshall was the better option for things like this. Despite the heat beginning to wear at her patience, she refused to examine why she wasn’t annoyed at having to give a reason for searching out the packaging of the box. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that Barney seemed distant and even more distracted than usual; if he could act aloof, so could she.
“Oh, right. Well, it’s in the closet that I keep my old porn collection in.” Nodding towards the direction of the closet, he took the glass that Robin handed him.
“You store your old -- No. Never mind.” Robin shook her head slightly in an I-don’t-really-want-to-know way, and headed to where she needed to go.
Barney watched nervously when Robin went to the closet. He fidgeted with the two tumblers, the clinking of ice cubes creating an impromptu rhythm. This was the moment he had been waiting for, the reason he had called Robin over instead of Marshall. All he had to do now was wait for her to return, then tell her. (Possibly he’d let her fix the air conditioner first, in case his confession scared her off.)
Four Months Ago
It had been all right at first, going unnoticed in a dark corner of everyone’s peripheral vision, and with the whole “Marshall Ericsson, put a baby in me,” situation Lily had been pre-occupied, distracted. Now, though, with the massive panic attack out of the way about possibly becoming a mother and the realisation that she could wait, Lily was free to take a closer look at that dark corner, and properly examine the thing she had noticed a while ago. And when she did, when she realised what she thought she knew, she anchored on and wouldn’t let up on her relentless, subtle interrogation.
“Just admit it, Barney!”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, Aldrin,” Barney moved around the counter and further away from Lily. He was starting to wish he had never let her into his apartment in the first place; she was like a bloodhound who had latched on to the scent of an escaped convict. He decided to discreetly change the subject. “I want you to make --” Barney flipped his laptop open and swivelled it around to face Lily on the other side of the counter, “-- this.”
“You want me to make... a diamond pin-striped suit?” The frown on Lily’s face transformed from one of slight confusion to one of annoyance. “Barney. You called me all the way over here to ask me to make you a suit?”
“Yes. And no. But yes!”
“And you’re sure there isn’t anything you’d like to confess?”
There was silence, and then, “With diamond pin-stripes.”
“No, Barney, that cannot seriously be the reason you called me all the way down here.”
“Eh, yes, it can, Lily. Have you not met me?”
From the way he skirted around the subject, Lily realised that what she thought she knew, she actually didn’t. “Oh, no. You’re in love with Robin again, aren’t you? And here I was just thinking you were sleeping with her again.”
“I can’t help it, Lily. What do I do? You have to help me stop feeling this way. Or, preferably, stop feeling at all.”
“You have to tell her, Barney.”
Barney pushed away from the counter and readjusted his suit. “Eh, yeah, right, Lily. There’s no way I’m telling her.” He scoffed and turned away.
Robin had been searching for the spare part for over twenty minutes now, but the noises of someone shifting boxes had ceased over ten minutes ago. Awareness of this fact took its time filtering through to Barney, caught up as he was in thinking about how Lily’s mind games had landed him in his current predicament.
“Robin?” His brow furrowed as he headed towards the closet, but his journey was cut short as Robin came around the corner. And as he had expected, she wasn’t returning empty-handed. Only, she also wasn’t returning with the spare part she had set out for: in her hand was clutched several unsealed envelopes, some with letters slipping precariously out of the envelopes. Barney’s stomach clenched unpleasantly; he felt like he was going over a high dip on a roller coaster and, while the rest of his body was going down, his stomach was heading up. He could feel the slight damp of sweat at his hairline, but his body felt cold.
“Barney,” Robin started slowly. “What’s this?” She raised her hand that held the envelopes and gave the items a little shake. Her head was tilted slightly in curiosity, but the tone of her voice was one of worried suspicion.
Barney stared speechlessly at Robin for a few seconds as his brain went into overdrive as he began to fabricate some elaborate lie to explain away any possible implication the letters held. Robin interrupted his thought process before he could finalise his excuse.
“Barney?” Her voice had gone quieter, but Barney thought she sounded like she was on the verge of hyperventilating.
“They’re Ted’s,” he answered, abandoning his original lie to go for a simpler one. As soon as he heard it, he nodded sagely; it sounded plausible. “Yeah, I, er, kept them for him.”
He hadn’t.
Pre-suit Barney wanted to shout his feelings for Robin from the rooftops, or at least sing her a love ballad. But suited Barney wouldn’t allow it: exposing your feelings in such a way left you vulnerable to rejection and subsequently humiliation, way too Ted-like. So Barney made a compromise with himself: he would write out how he felt, no holds barred, and then he would hide the letter in an unsealed envelope deep within the confinements of his one of his closets. What he hadn’t expected to find himself doing was writing multiple letters. He’d thought that once he’d written down his feelings they would disappear. But that was merely naivety shining through. And, if anything, his repressed, contained feelings were growing stronger. He was developing a form of pseudo-erotomania that he couldn’t shake: every time Robin pushed stray strands of her hair behind her ears she was communicating her affection for him, whereas a sip of her drink meant she wanted to kiss him but had to restrain herself from her almost overwhelming emotions. Barney knew it was absurd but he couldn’t help it. This whole business of lusting after Robin was driving him slowly insane. OK, so he would hit on her and make innuendos about what they could do together, but Robin merely rolled her eyes, or gave a slight shrug to dismiss what she saw as meaningless advances from her overly sexual friend.
The letters were a good way of him conveying his still stubbornly lingering feelings for Robin without the rest of the group knowing. After all, he couldn’t use his blog because they all read it. And mass e-mails were for strippers and sexual exploits with strangers, not girly expressions of love and undying devotion to one Robin Scherbatsky.
“There’s a whole box full of them. All addressed to me, and none of them from Ted.” Robin looked off to the side as she lowered her hand. Avoiding eye contact she continued, “Barney, do you want to get back together?”
Barney had to think this through; he had lost his Awesome once before and he wasn’t sure he was willing to lose it again. The silence lingered. Robin was now looking at him expectantly, waiting. And he was stumped because he didn’t know what he should tell her. In fact, he wasn’t even sure what it was he wanted to say. Sure, all the letters were written by him, and they did express how he felt, but now that Robin had seen them, and most definitely read them, he suddenly wasn’t sure if all he’d written was what he actually wanted: to once again delve into the role of being a boyfriend -- a boyfriend in a committed, monogamous relationship.
“Do you?” He decided to invert the question, to put the pressure on Robin.
Robin looked upwards thoughtfully. When she made eye contact with Barney, she gave a non-committal shrug. “Meh.” And just like that, any tension that was attempting to creep into the atmosphere scurried off. “We were great together.” Robin’s casual, almost dismissive tone was just the jolt that Barney needed.
“More than great, we were Awesome.”
“Yeah. Well, at the beginning anyway.”
Barney nodded, remembering. “And the sex was amazing.”
“Well, of course.” Robin scoffed like this was a requisite to any relationship either of them were involved in.
“So maybe we should do it again?” Barney spoke slowly, hesitantly.
A smile slowly appeared on Robin’s face. “We should. But maybe do the whole thing backwards?”
Barney frowned, tilted his head slightly. “Backwards?”
“Yeah, you know: date first, have sex after.”
The look on Barney’s face was incredulous. “On second thoughts, maybe you’re not as Awesome as I remember.”
Robin quickly closed the gap between them and punched Barney in the arm. Hard. Harder than he would admit later on when he recounted the story to the rest of the group.
“Ow!” He pulled back, rubbing his arm and then promptly straightened up. “That didn’t even hurt.” He shrugged, once again re-adjusting his suit.
Robin linked her arm with Barney’s injured one and pulled him towards the apartment door. “Let’s go play laser tag. And if we manage to make a few kids cry, we’ll have sex afterwards. It’ll be a way of signifying our renewed relationship.”
“Or we can have sex first and then we can go play laser tag. Even better: you can fix the air conditioner, and then we can have more sex!”
“Barney.” Robin pulled away from Barney, briefly halting their journey to the door. She gave him a look that said ‘really?’ but nothing in the look conveyed shock or anger or repulsion. This was, after all, Barney Stinson. “At least buy me an ice-cream sundae from McLaren’s first; I don’t work for free.”
There was an innuendo in there somewhere, but Barney was pre-occupied with doing a mental happy dance. So all he did was smile goofily and allow Robin to lead him out of the sweltering apartment.