Last Train Home
Expensive Imagination
(A/N: The mother has inspired me. I love her and I love Ted and yeah. Props to the himym team for finally starting to come through/creating a show that, at its best, is so amazingly formed.)
"...Who could overlook that?" Robin asks him. Who could overlook my not being able to have children, she asks him. My internal failure, she thinks to herself.
Two kids and a white picket fence have been in the back of his mind for years, informing almost every decision that he makes.
Except this one.
"I could," Ted says, and for a moment, it looks like they'll be Ted & Robin again.
(But then he asks her do you love me (please say yes, please say yes) and she tells him, no.)
He's quiet after that. Lonely.
He always thought it was easy. That when you found a girl- the girl- you married her. You meet her, you love her, you spend the rest of your life with her.
Easy.
Life isn't like that though, and Ted's loved more than one woman who he thought at one point- I could stay in love with you forever. But none of them-
None of them work.
And that terrifies him. It scares him to pieces that he hasn't been able to make it work with anyone, why hasn't he been able to make it work?
He has this huge transcript, a dating CV that's large and painful, and it just keeps growing until eventually, he thinks, girls are going to stop saying yes to dates once they see where he's been; how his greatest love married his best friend, and how his fiancé left him at the altar.
He's 36 and living in New York City and yet somehow, somehow that doesn't make him feel lucky. Just lonely and lost and a little bit- a little bit resigned actually, that nothing has happened yet. That nothing will.
So he packs up his apartment, and sticks a for sale sign in front of his house. He drives Lily to the train station and thinks about Robin's necklace that's sitting in the back of the car. He doesn't give it to her. He slumps in a chair and has a drink, does the crossword puzzle. Sighs, and thinks about the fact that in three days he'll be in Chicago. Thinks about how they're splitting up. Lily and Marshall to Rome. Robin and Barney married and in New York. Him- him in Chicago.
A fresh start, he tells himself.
He doesn't really mean it.
Before he knows it, he's waiting for the train at Farhampton station. The lilac buttonhole he's wearing is drooping in the rain, in the exhaustion it's been through this wedding. But it's over. Barney and Robin are married. And Marshall and Lily are-
They'll work it out, he thinks.
New York or Rome, one or the other. They'll stay together, raise their child together, be the couple that they've always been-together.
But for him, for him it's time to go.
It's time to go, he thinks.
It's time to go, he realizes, so where is the train?
The train runs late. It starts to rain. He sits his book in his lap; the one thing he'd wanted from his suitcase. Lily and Marshall can bring back the rest when they drive back. Can... Can send it to him, even.
He doesn't know, doesn't really care. That life is over anyway.
That life isn't over, his friends are still-
He doesn't want to think about it. Opens Love in the Time of Cholera. Avoids looking at his bruised hand.
He doesn't hear her walk up.
It's when the train pulls up that he sees her.
Well.
He sees her umbrella. The yellow colour that he'd know anywhere. Something falls out of his mouth, maybe his breath, maybe his heart, maybe the last shred of hope that New York City hasn't stolen from him and used up.
Maybe, just maybe, something's happening here.
(Of course, when he sees her, this isn't really his first thought. He just looks her up and down. Eyes get stuck on the umbrella. Wonders if it could possibly- but how? - be his.)
(...He thinks about Cindy. About how he left it with her. About her roommate's band that's been in the back of his mind all weekend if he's being honest. The band that he hired.)
(He sees her ankle, feels something inside of him twist in anticipation.)
(But then: you're leaving, something whispers inside himself bitterly. He's supposed to be leaving. Let it be, he thinks. Let it be, he thinks. You've done enough, Mosby. You've exhausted the city, you've exhausted yourself, you've-)
"Are you getting on?" The carriage officer asks him. "This is the last train to New York," he says
He blinks, shakes his head. Smiles a little as he sees the girl turn back to look at him; to see who the man's talking to; to see who might be getting on the train.
"Yeah," he says, "Yeah, sorry, I uh, I wasn't paying attention," he lies, holding up his book.
He hops up off of the platform. Gets on board. Sits on the row opposite hers at the front. Sinks into his seat a little, but not too far, because he made a decision when he got on the train.
"I used to have an umbrella like that," he says, waving a hand at the girl opposite him.
She smiles.
"I don't suppose you somehow left it at my apartment, did you?"
He laughs.
Because, yeah. Yeah he did, actually. He left a big old chunk of himself sitting in someone's New York City apartment.
Time to get it back.