It started with a piece of paper, a little folded note with a single line written on it, this tiny slip of a thing that had the power to change his entire life. After thirty years of wondering where he came from, Barney Stinson would soon know who his father was. His mother had given him a name and this – his address and phone number written in her precise scrawl on the back of a market receipt for coffee and dish soap. Sitting alone in the booth at MacLaren's, he went through his game plan one last time before pulling out his phone to make the call.
Time ticked by slowly as Barney waited alone at his favorite haunt. Many of the usuals were there, offering the occasional head nod as they passed by on their way to and from retrieving drinks at the bar. However, Barney was decidedly alone that night, with the rest of the gang busy with their lives. He had thought about calling Ted earlier for moral support but thought twice when he remembered that he was supposed to go to some boring art exhibit with Zoe in Soho. So, instead, Barney stayed in the booth alone, waiting to hear the bell chime over the door.
Robin came in twenty minutes later, her dark hair covered in white flakes from the start of a snowfall outside. She had come straight over from her new job when she got the call. His question had been cryptic, one that she knew he wouldn't ask without cause. As she stood next to the booth beside him, she became immediately concerned. Barney was silently clutching a paper tightly in his hand, his entire body shaking as he failed to look up at her.
Sliding into the booth beside him, Robin reached for Barney's hand and pried the piece of paper free from his fingers. He looked up at her like a lost little boy, a gaze she had only seen when he had been sick that first year she had been in New York. "Why are we going to Brooklyn, Barney?" she asked him quietly. He had never hidden his distaste for the boroughs, claiming that anything outside Manhattan simply wasn't the real New York.
"After Marshall lost his dad and he heard that voicemail, I just knew that it was time," he said simply. When he didn't say anything else, Robin gently pressed for him to continue. "I called my mom. You guys talked about it later, how the funeral made you want to talk to your dad. Well, I realized that I didn't have a father to call. Sometimes that didn't really seem to matter, but after James found his father, I don't know, it's just really had me thinking. You guys all know how much I have wanted this, but a part of me was always glad that I didn't have it because then I could be disappointed."
Robin finally understood what was on the piece of paper and why he had asked her to go to Brooklyn with him. "But you'll never know if we don't find out," she reminded him, setting the folded note in front of him. "Barney, I know that it's scary. It's really scary, and it's okay for you to be afraid. You've been building this man up in your mind for a very long time, and the last thing that you want to feel is disappointment. But I think that if you don't find out, you'll be more disappointing in that than you could ever be in finding out who the man on that piece of paper is."
"If we don't find out?" he repeated, looking up at her uncertainly. They had been broken up for over a year now, but the underlying tension was still there between them. Sure, they had both pretended to move on but they hadn't really. However, as he gazed at her with question in his blue eyes, Robin could only nod her head and take his hand. He wouldn't have to go through this alone. "Thanks, Scherbatsky."
She only smiled and shrugged nonchalantly, understanding that it was very important not to make a big deal about it. "There's a subway going out to Brooklynn in twenty minutes. If we hurry, we can probably make it."
Barney followed her out of the booth and reached back for her hand as they hurried along the busy street. They made it through the turnstile just in time to plop down a few dollars for a pass that would get them out of the city and back. "Two for the last train to Brooklyn," he told the older man behind the glass window. The man smiled at him and nodded before passing back four tokens. Robin thanked the attendant for them both before pulling Barney by the wrist to the platform. They had exactly three minutes to spare, and Barney was fairly sure his heart was going to explode from the adrenaline coursing through his veins.
"Alright, Barney, we can do this," Robin said softly, threading her fingers through his as they stood waiting amongst the small huddle of people. She stood close to him, resting her head on his shoulder and trying to stay warm in the chilly night air. Barney seemed to notice as he wrapped his lush cashmere scarf around her neck. "Why don't you tell me what you do know?"
"His name is Patrick Beck," Barney told her. "He lives in Brooklyn with his wife. My mom found his name for me in the phone book. Her name is Allison. He met my mom at a poetry reading. They dated for a few months but eventually broke up. By the time Mom realized that she was pregnant, she had lost track of him. She heard from a friend of a friend that he had moved somewhere out west It wasn't until she saw his picture on a billboard when I was around ten that she found out he was in New York again. He's a real estate agent, apparently a pretty successful one."
Robin squeezed his hand as the arriving subway sped past them. When the train had stopped, it was she who put her hand on the small of his back to lead him into the car and toward a pair of empty seats near the doors. "Did she say why she never told you? Or why she never told him?" she eventually asked when they were sitting down. The story didn't quite add up right. Barney's father sounded like a decent guy for all intents and purposes. Why would she want to hide his father from his son?
Barney shrugged and looked down at his perfectly polished shoes. All the expensive, one-of-a-kind Italian designer suits couldn't hide the fact that he was nothing more than a scared little boy right now. "She just said that it was too late by then. That was the only explanation she had. I was really upset at first, but now I don't know..." he trailed off before he rubbed his hands over his face soberly. For a guy like Barney, one who pretended in the superficial, it was all getting to be a little too much. "My mom did a really good job raising me, Robin, you know? She always made sure that we had everything that we wanted, even if she had to work long hours to make sure that we got it. She loved us. Man, did she love us. But it just wasn't the same as knowing who my father was. I wanted a dad like all the rest of the kids. I'll never understand why she didn't just give us the thing that we wanted most."
"I don't understand it either, Barney, unless maybe she was scared that she was going to lose you," Robin offered up. Fear made people do things they never though possible. Ration and logic were lost in situations like these. She only knew that by extension, though. As emotionally unavailable as her father might be, at least he was there. They had their own kind of relationship. All Barney had ever wanted was a chance at having something like that. "Barney, can I ask you a question?"
"Sure."
His answer was hollow, though his eyes were sincere. Robin looked over his head at the lights as they whirred by in a blurry haze. New York was its most beautiful at night in the winter, with the snowflakes sparkling amongst the lit-up skyline. Winter was also the time that New York felt the most like home. She suddenly missed her parents back in Vancouver, wishing that she could be wrapped up in her grandmother's afghan on the couch with her mom next to her and her father in the chair on her other side. They'd watch old movies in silence, drinking coffee and laughing or crying in all the same spots as they always had.
"Why did you call me to come with you tonight?"
Barney thought about blowing it off, chalking it up to proximity and convenience and a handful of little lies that would have allowed him to keep his dark secret. However, when he met her caring gaze, all the false words fell away so that he was only left with the truth. "Because you're the one I need with me, Robin, you know that," he confessed softly before looking away. An older woman smiled at him politely and he realized she probably thought that they were a couple. They had been once upon a time. As he look back down at their entwined hands, he wondered if they would be again some day.
"I'm here as long as you need me, whenever you need me, wherever you need me," she promised, squeezing his hand tightly for emphasis. "Even if it has me going out to Brooklyn in the middle of the night."
They sat in silence for a few minutes longer before the subway finally pulled up to the station in Brooklyn. Barney took a deep breath as he reached with his free hand into his pocket. The piece of paper was still stowed their safely, his lifeline between the present and the future. He slipped it out and pressed it into Robin's hand. She knew that, after years of knowing and even loving Barney, he was finally letting her all the way in. He was trusting her with this, with leading him on in this journey and believing that she would be by his side whether it went good or bad. They might not still be together, but Robin knew then with absolute certainty that Barney Stinson still loved her. As they stepped off the train hand-in-hand, Robin knew that nothing in the world could have felt better.
Fin.