Fic: Letting it Out
Title: Letting it Out
Rating: PG-13 for a bit of language
Word Count: 2144
Pairing: Barney/Robin
Spoilers: Post 4.12 "Benefits"
Description: Barney finally goes to a therapist, post-"Benefits".
Author's Note: Everyone and their grandmother seems to be doing "Benefits" fics. And yesterday the only two things I watched were "Benefits" and Antwone Fisher, so... this is what came out.
Wilhelm Grossbard was sitting at his desk, filling out paperwork for his new patient with an irrational phobia of pigeons, when his office door flew open and a short brunette woman shoved a suited blond man through the doorway.
“Ow! Lily!” the familiar man protested.
“Barney, I’m telling you, you can’t keep these feelings of yours locked up forever! And since you spent the morning traumatizing my kindergarteners, you owe me this.”
“Lily, wait.” She froze halfway out the door, looking back at him. “…Can I at least keep Feely the Share Bear?” he asked somewhat sheepishly.
She rolled her eyes and dug in her purse for a moment, digging out a tiny light brown teddy bear with a bow tie, tossing it at Barney in disdain. And with that, the woman slammed the door shut, leaving Barney Stinson trapped in the office with his former therapist.
Barney dusted himself off and straightened his tie, saying, “What’s up, Dr. G?”
“It’s good to see you, Mr. Stinson,” Dr. Grossbard said, smiling at him. “I didn’t expect to see you back here after we’d finished our eight sessions.” Over the summer, Barney had been a patient of his, sent there as part of his rehabilitation for his bus accident. He’d been sent there to talk about the psychological trauma he’d suffered from being hit by a bus that May, but over the course of the prescribed sessions, they’d talked about much, much more than that.
They’d discussed his lack of a father, and his fear of intimacy, and a certain young woman whose name Barney never mentioned and who he’d never talked about for long, always changing the subject or claiming his time was up whenever Dr. Grossbard tried to delve deeper. It hadn’t taken long for the psychiatrist to realize that Barney needed much more time with him than the hospital had prescribed for him; however, once he mentioned his belief that Barney was a narcissist with severe attachment disorder, he’d stormed out of the office and hadn’t come back.
But now, it seemed, he had a second chance to help him, and second chances didn’t come around often in his profession.
“Please, have a seat,” he said, gesturing to the couch across the room, getting up to make his way toward the armchair that sat next to it. Barney, however, held up a hand.
“I don’t have anything to say,” he said shortly, crossing his arms like a petulant teenager. “I’m only here because my friend Lily kidnapped me and dragged me here. Literally: I’ve got scratch marks all along my back!” He began to untuck his shirt to show the doctor.
“That isn’t necessary,” Dr. Grossbard said quickly. Barney pulled his shirt back down, chuckling.
“Really, I’ll just let myself out. I’m sure you must be busy anyway…”
“Actually, I don’t have any more appointments until 4:30,” he said, checking his calendar. “And I’m sure your friend’s very concerned about you; otherwise she wouldn’t have dragged you here.”
Barney scoffed. “She’s overreacting, that’s all. I’m totally fine.”
Dr. Grossbard raised his eyebrows at his patient. “Are you fine, Mr. Stinson?” Barney opened his mouth to let out another wiseass reply, no doubt, but the words seemed to catch in his throat, as he eventually shut his mouth and swallowed hard, his eyes turned toward the ground. “How about this,” Dr. Grossbard continued, dragging the armchair closer to his desk, turning it around so whoever sat in it would face away from him. “How about you sit here?”
Barney raised an eyebrow at him. “What?”
“Pretend I’m not here. You can keep quiet, or you can talk about whatever problem it is you have. Either way, I won’t say a word. It’ll be like I’m not here.” He smiled at Barney’s confused face. “Just talking about something helps, even if no one’s listening.”
Barney hesitated a moment, then sat down in the overstuffed armchair, facing away from the therapist. Dr. Grossbard could barely see the back of his head from where he sat back at his desk. “This is kind of like confession,” he heard Barney say, the hint of a nostalgic smile barely audible in his voice. He ran a hand along the chair’s arm. “Back when James and I were kids, we used to go to church all the time… we’d walk five blocks by ourselves to St. Charles every Sunday and sit in the back. And then after, we’d go into the little booths where you’d kneel and confess your sins to some priest on the other side of a screen, and he’d say that whatever you’d done, no matter how terrible it was, God had forgiven you.”
“Did your mother ever take you to church?” Dr. Grossbard asked.
“You said you weren’t going to say anything.”
“Right. I’m not.”
“No, she never took us,” Barney went on. “She was always… busy.” He fell silent once again. Dr. Grossbard waited for him to say something else, his clipboard hidden on his lap so he could take notes to add to Barney’s dusty file. He saw his former patient lean an elbow on one of the chair’s arms, running a hand back and forth through his hair in frustration, not saying a word. After five minutes or so, Barney chuckled to himself, a hollow, humorless sort of laugh.
“I can’t believe I actually told her,” he whispered. The psychiatrist bit his tongue to prevent himself from asking who “her” was. He thought he had an idea, anyway. “What was I thinking, just letting those words slip out?”
Ah. Now this was good. Dr. Grossbard started taking notes.
“Felt good, though,” he barely heard Barney murmur. “Been carrying that around for so long… finally getting to tell her I loved her was…” He sighed. “It doesn’t feel so heavy anymore. Trying to hide something that huge from her - and from everyone - was just so draining. I finally got to tell her how I feel, and… it felt so awesome.”
Dr. Grossbard smiled and scribbled Finally expressing healthy emotions? on his clipboard.
“And after all that, it didn’t even count!” he shouted rather abruptly, slamming his fist into the arm of the chair.
He crossed out the sentence he’d just written.
“I told her I loved her, and she… she didn’t believe me. Or… she didn’t get it. For once, I try to tell her everything, and she thinks I’m making fun of Ted. And then we went to eat tacos because she thought I loved them, and I kept dropping bits of ground beef in my lap because my hands were shaking so badly, and - and I don’t even LIKE Chinese food!” He shook his head slightly. “It’s just so damn frustrating, this game we’ve been playing.
“She can’t be this blind, can she? Does she really have no idea how I feel about her? Is she just in denial? I’ve been so… less than awesome lately, she has to know something’s up! She’s not stupid… no, definitely not stupid,” he added, softer, more reverently. “No… maybe that’s why she’s making this so damn hard.” He formed a fist with his left hand, pressing it against the arm of the chair, his arm trembling. “Lily knows, Ted knows, Marshall has to know by now, too.” He grit his teeth. “Why - doesn’t - she - see - it? Why, Feely?”
Dr. Grossbard leaned around the side of the chair and saw that his patient appeared to be talking to the small teddy bear he had begged his friend for. He smiled at the sincerity with which Barney was addressing this apparent childhood artifact, as if the bear had the answers to all his problems. He scribbled something on the clipboard about regressing to a childlike state.
“She thinks all we had together was just sex. But… that’s not all it was. I had to go and catch feelings.” He sighed. “It ruined everything. I don’t even know what I want from her anymore… but I just need her to know. To really know that I can’t just be her friend anymore.
“And Ted…” Dr. Grossbard saw him hold the bear tighter. “He kept having sex with her and telling me all about it. With his smug face and his bravado about her, like she didn’t matter to him… and then he told me it was all my fault, on top of that.” His voice was getting more and more strained with anger, and poor Feely the Share Bear was getting mangled in his hands as he twisted its tiny plushy torso. “I kept going out and smashing those TVs, because if I was around him for any longer while he was going on like that, I’d probably kill him.”
Dr. Grossbard wrote ANGER MANAGEMENT on the clipboard, underlining it three times.
“But!” Barney interrupted himself, releasing the bear and letting it fall to the floor, where it landed with a squeak! “Ted’s a good bro, or he was in the end. He stopped it once he finally got a clue about how I feel, and I never had to tell him anything.” He fell into a contemplative silence once more. “He knows that love can’t all be physical,” he said in a whisper after a while (Dr. Grossbard had to lean halfway over the desk to be able to hear him). “He isn’t as fucked up as I am, he can actually have relationships. He doesn’t know how to separate physical and emotional, but… is that such a bad thing? I could probably take a few tips from him.” He shook his head in disbelief. “After all these years, he’s going to be the one to teach me how to live.”
He covered his eyes with a trembling hand.
“What’s this woman’s name?” Dr. Grossbard asked him gently. He’d noted that Barney had still never said her name, not even when he had talked about being in love with her. Perhaps he still found it too painful.
Barney drew a shaky breath and looked heavenward, as though trying to draw enough strength to say her name. “Robin,” he finally whispered. “Her name is… Robin.” He said her name like it was some kind of prayer, and as soon as her name was out of his mouth, he seemed relieved, like the burden of keeping her name secret had been lifted from his shoulders. If Dr. Grossbard could have seen Barney’s face, he was sure it would have looked illuminated, peaceful, softer.
“You can’t give up on Robin,” he told Barney. “If you truly love her, you can’t give up on her. But,” he added, “first, you’re going to need to figure out how to use your anger more constructively. If Robin’s like most women…”
“She isn’t like most women,” Barney protested. “She shoots things up on the roof for fun.”
“Still,” Dr. Grossbard continued, “breaking TVs when she’s sleeping with other guys isn’t the best way to express your anger.”
“But that was different - I thought they were getting back together! I thought I’d lost her!”
“Let me finish.” Barney fell silent. “Look, the longer you keep something like this bottled up, the bigger the explosion’s going to be once you finally let it out. It’s not healthy to keep so many emotions inside. And I’m not just talking about love, either. Maybe you think if you let people see how you’re feeling, you’ll get hurt because they’ll know how to exploit your weaknesses…”
Barney whispered a word that sounded like “Shannon.”
“Who’s Shannon?” he asked him. But Barney shook his head rapidly, refusing to answer. The doctor decided to let it go for the time being. “But you have real friends who care about you… your friend who brought you here today knew that you needed to talk to me, even though you didn’t want to. That’s the sort of thing a real friend does.” He let that sink in. “Don’t you think Robin deserves to know the truth about how you feel about her?” he asked, his voice full of the kind of persuasive empathy a therapist has to use when telling a patient to do something they don’t want to.
There was a long, long pause, punctuated by a soft sniffle or two, in which Barney appeared to be thinking about Dr. Grossbard’s words. Then, he finally said, hoarsely, “How am I supposed to pretend you aren’t here when you keep talking?”
Dr. Grossbard sighed. “I’m sorry,” he said, a bit more irritably than he intended to.
“I forgive you.” Barney got up from the chair, wiping his eyes with his tie. “Same time next week, doc?”
Dr. Grossbard smiled and nodded. “Do I get to talk next time?”
Barney shrugged. “We’ll see.” He smiled, stooping to pick up Feely the Share Bear as he walked toward the door. As he left the office, he seemed taller to the therapist somehow: a little less cocky, a little more confident.
Rating: PG-13 for a bit of language
Word Count: 2144
Pairing: Barney/Robin
Spoilers: Post 4.12 "Benefits"
Description: Barney finally goes to a therapist, post-"Benefits".
Author's Note: Everyone and their grandmother seems to be doing "Benefits" fics. And yesterday the only two things I watched were "Benefits" and Antwone Fisher, so... this is what came out.
Wilhelm Grossbard was sitting at his desk, filling out paperwork for his new patient with an irrational phobia of pigeons, when his office door flew open and a short brunette woman shoved a suited blond man through the doorway.
“Ow! Lily!” the familiar man protested.
“Barney, I’m telling you, you can’t keep these feelings of yours locked up forever! And since you spent the morning traumatizing my kindergarteners, you owe me this.”
“Lily, wait.” She froze halfway out the door, looking back at him. “…Can I at least keep Feely the Share Bear?” he asked somewhat sheepishly.
She rolled her eyes and dug in her purse for a moment, digging out a tiny light brown teddy bear with a bow tie, tossing it at Barney in disdain. And with that, the woman slammed the door shut, leaving Barney Stinson trapped in the office with his former therapist.
Barney dusted himself off and straightened his tie, saying, “What’s up, Dr. G?”
“It’s good to see you, Mr. Stinson,” Dr. Grossbard said, smiling at him. “I didn’t expect to see you back here after we’d finished our eight sessions.” Over the summer, Barney had been a patient of his, sent there as part of his rehabilitation for his bus accident. He’d been sent there to talk about the psychological trauma he’d suffered from being hit by a bus that May, but over the course of the prescribed sessions, they’d talked about much, much more than that.
They’d discussed his lack of a father, and his fear of intimacy, and a certain young woman whose name Barney never mentioned and who he’d never talked about for long, always changing the subject or claiming his time was up whenever Dr. Grossbard tried to delve deeper. It hadn’t taken long for the psychiatrist to realize that Barney needed much more time with him than the hospital had prescribed for him; however, once he mentioned his belief that Barney was a narcissist with severe attachment disorder, he’d stormed out of the office and hadn’t come back.
But now, it seemed, he had a second chance to help him, and second chances didn’t come around often in his profession.
“Please, have a seat,” he said, gesturing to the couch across the room, getting up to make his way toward the armchair that sat next to it. Barney, however, held up a hand.
“I don’t have anything to say,” he said shortly, crossing his arms like a petulant teenager. “I’m only here because my friend Lily kidnapped me and dragged me here. Literally: I’ve got scratch marks all along my back!” He began to untuck his shirt to show the doctor.
“That isn’t necessary,” Dr. Grossbard said quickly. Barney pulled his shirt back down, chuckling.
“Really, I’ll just let myself out. I’m sure you must be busy anyway…”
“Actually, I don’t have any more appointments until 4:30,” he said, checking his calendar. “And I’m sure your friend’s very concerned about you; otherwise she wouldn’t have dragged you here.”
Barney scoffed. “She’s overreacting, that’s all. I’m totally fine.”
Dr. Grossbard raised his eyebrows at his patient. “Are you fine, Mr. Stinson?” Barney opened his mouth to let out another wiseass reply, no doubt, but the words seemed to catch in his throat, as he eventually shut his mouth and swallowed hard, his eyes turned toward the ground. “How about this,” Dr. Grossbard continued, dragging the armchair closer to his desk, turning it around so whoever sat in it would face away from him. “How about you sit here?”
Barney raised an eyebrow at him. “What?”
“Pretend I’m not here. You can keep quiet, or you can talk about whatever problem it is you have. Either way, I won’t say a word. It’ll be like I’m not here.” He smiled at Barney’s confused face. “Just talking about something helps, even if no one’s listening.”
Barney hesitated a moment, then sat down in the overstuffed armchair, facing away from the therapist. Dr. Grossbard could barely see the back of his head from where he sat back at his desk. “This is kind of like confession,” he heard Barney say, the hint of a nostalgic smile barely audible in his voice. He ran a hand along the chair’s arm. “Back when James and I were kids, we used to go to church all the time… we’d walk five blocks by ourselves to St. Charles every Sunday and sit in the back. And then after, we’d go into the little booths where you’d kneel and confess your sins to some priest on the other side of a screen, and he’d say that whatever you’d done, no matter how terrible it was, God had forgiven you.”
“Did your mother ever take you to church?” Dr. Grossbard asked.
“You said you weren’t going to say anything.”
“Right. I’m not.”
“No, she never took us,” Barney went on. “She was always… busy.” He fell silent once again. Dr. Grossbard waited for him to say something else, his clipboard hidden on his lap so he could take notes to add to Barney’s dusty file. He saw his former patient lean an elbow on one of the chair’s arms, running a hand back and forth through his hair in frustration, not saying a word. After five minutes or so, Barney chuckled to himself, a hollow, humorless sort of laugh.
“I can’t believe I actually told her,” he whispered. The psychiatrist bit his tongue to prevent himself from asking who “her” was. He thought he had an idea, anyway. “What was I thinking, just letting those words slip out?”
Ah. Now this was good. Dr. Grossbard started taking notes.
“Felt good, though,” he barely heard Barney murmur. “Been carrying that around for so long… finally getting to tell her I loved her was…” He sighed. “It doesn’t feel so heavy anymore. Trying to hide something that huge from her - and from everyone - was just so draining. I finally got to tell her how I feel, and… it felt so awesome.”
Dr. Grossbard smiled and scribbled Finally expressing healthy emotions? on his clipboard.
“And after all that, it didn’t even count!” he shouted rather abruptly, slamming his fist into the arm of the chair.
He crossed out the sentence he’d just written.
“I told her I loved her, and she… she didn’t believe me. Or… she didn’t get it. For once, I try to tell her everything, and she thinks I’m making fun of Ted. And then we went to eat tacos because she thought I loved them, and I kept dropping bits of ground beef in my lap because my hands were shaking so badly, and - and I don’t even LIKE Chinese food!” He shook his head slightly. “It’s just so damn frustrating, this game we’ve been playing.
“She can’t be this blind, can she? Does she really have no idea how I feel about her? Is she just in denial? I’ve been so… less than awesome lately, she has to know something’s up! She’s not stupid… no, definitely not stupid,” he added, softer, more reverently. “No… maybe that’s why she’s making this so damn hard.” He formed a fist with his left hand, pressing it against the arm of the chair, his arm trembling. “Lily knows, Ted knows, Marshall has to know by now, too.” He grit his teeth. “Why - doesn’t - she - see - it? Why, Feely?”
Dr. Grossbard leaned around the side of the chair and saw that his patient appeared to be talking to the small teddy bear he had begged his friend for. He smiled at the sincerity with which Barney was addressing this apparent childhood artifact, as if the bear had the answers to all his problems. He scribbled something on the clipboard about regressing to a childlike state.
“She thinks all we had together was just sex. But… that’s not all it was. I had to go and catch feelings.” He sighed. “It ruined everything. I don’t even know what I want from her anymore… but I just need her to know. To really know that I can’t just be her friend anymore.
“And Ted…” Dr. Grossbard saw him hold the bear tighter. “He kept having sex with her and telling me all about it. With his smug face and his bravado about her, like she didn’t matter to him… and then he told me it was all my fault, on top of that.” His voice was getting more and more strained with anger, and poor Feely the Share Bear was getting mangled in his hands as he twisted its tiny plushy torso. “I kept going out and smashing those TVs, because if I was around him for any longer while he was going on like that, I’d probably kill him.”
Dr. Grossbard wrote ANGER MANAGEMENT on the clipboard, underlining it three times.
“But!” Barney interrupted himself, releasing the bear and letting it fall to the floor, where it landed with a squeak! “Ted’s a good bro, or he was in the end. He stopped it once he finally got a clue about how I feel, and I never had to tell him anything.” He fell into a contemplative silence once more. “He knows that love can’t all be physical,” he said in a whisper after a while (Dr. Grossbard had to lean halfway over the desk to be able to hear him). “He isn’t as fucked up as I am, he can actually have relationships. He doesn’t know how to separate physical and emotional, but… is that such a bad thing? I could probably take a few tips from him.” He shook his head in disbelief. “After all these years, he’s going to be the one to teach me how to live.”
He covered his eyes with a trembling hand.
“What’s this woman’s name?” Dr. Grossbard asked him gently. He’d noted that Barney had still never said her name, not even when he had talked about being in love with her. Perhaps he still found it too painful.
Barney drew a shaky breath and looked heavenward, as though trying to draw enough strength to say her name. “Robin,” he finally whispered. “Her name is… Robin.” He said her name like it was some kind of prayer, and as soon as her name was out of his mouth, he seemed relieved, like the burden of keeping her name secret had been lifted from his shoulders. If Dr. Grossbard could have seen Barney’s face, he was sure it would have looked illuminated, peaceful, softer.
“You can’t give up on Robin,” he told Barney. “If you truly love her, you can’t give up on her. But,” he added, “first, you’re going to need to figure out how to use your anger more constructively. If Robin’s like most women…”
“She isn’t like most women,” Barney protested. “She shoots things up on the roof for fun.”
“Still,” Dr. Grossbard continued, “breaking TVs when she’s sleeping with other guys isn’t the best way to express your anger.”
“But that was different - I thought they were getting back together! I thought I’d lost her!”
“Let me finish.” Barney fell silent. “Look, the longer you keep something like this bottled up, the bigger the explosion’s going to be once you finally let it out. It’s not healthy to keep so many emotions inside. And I’m not just talking about love, either. Maybe you think if you let people see how you’re feeling, you’ll get hurt because they’ll know how to exploit your weaknesses…”
Barney whispered a word that sounded like “Shannon.”
“Who’s Shannon?” he asked him. But Barney shook his head rapidly, refusing to answer. The doctor decided to let it go for the time being. “But you have real friends who care about you… your friend who brought you here today knew that you needed to talk to me, even though you didn’t want to. That’s the sort of thing a real friend does.” He let that sink in. “Don’t you think Robin deserves to know the truth about how you feel about her?” he asked, his voice full of the kind of persuasive empathy a therapist has to use when telling a patient to do something they don’t want to.
There was a long, long pause, punctuated by a soft sniffle or two, in which Barney appeared to be thinking about Dr. Grossbard’s words. Then, he finally said, hoarsely, “How am I supposed to pretend you aren’t here when you keep talking?”
Dr. Grossbard sighed. “I’m sorry,” he said, a bit more irritably than he intended to.
“I forgive you.” Barney got up from the chair, wiping his eyes with his tie. “Same time next week, doc?”
Dr. Grossbard smiled and nodded. “Do I get to talk next time?”
Barney shrugged. “We’ll see.” He smiled, stooping to pick up Feely the Share Bear as he walked toward the door. As he left the office, he seemed taller to the therapist somehow: a little less cocky, a little more confident.