I don't own Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog or How I Met Your Mother, etc, etc, other disclaimer stuff.
The Evil League of Evil was falling apart after six months of Doctor Horrible's villainy. The Council of Champions was inches away from winning the battle raging across Los Angeles, and evildoers were fleeing the city. It had not taken long for Doctor Horrible to conclude he would have to retreat to survive.
But where?
New York, said a small voice in his head. He had always wanted to go there, but he would need a secret identity, a foolproof way of staying alive and evading capture.
The name he had taken was the one his cab driver had misheard when he introduced himself. He had taken a month to design a new life, a new home, a new personality, a fake family. He had dropped memory pills in secret into the drinks of his false mother, brother, ex-girlfriend, everyone he might need to pretend was once a part of his life. He had made a fake tape of a hippie version of himself proclaiming his passion for his then-true love. He bought a multitude of toys and forged photos that would be his alleged childhood. He purchased suits for the everyday wear of his new persona, the refined Casanova that would craft the most outrageous and exquisite lies to sleep with a woman. He had invaded the offices of an Altrucell building and created his own apparent workplace, where he would know all the men there and yet need no job. All the money he would ever need was that which he had stolen in his six months in L.A., and if he needed more, he would temporarily awaken from his fog of memory that kept him from knowing his job and steal more. Any time he needed information on anything his past self would have known, he would retrieve that single fact from the depths of his memory. If he ever needed to be Doctor Horrible again, his fabricated facade would break. That was the way his memory pill was designed, the one that had taken him many sleepless nights to create. Finally, he had swallowed it.
He was Barney.
A week from then, he had met a man named Ted at a nearby bar and begun to teach him how to live.