Fic: Shot Through the Heart (1/2)
Fandom: HIMYM - Barely Coping-verse (And I'll give you $10 if you know what this crosses over with.)
Word Count: This part: 1630
Rating: PG-15 for zombie carnage and language... and general weirdness.
Written for: The lovely loquaciousambie, and anyone who's ever been traumatized by "Barely Coping".
Summary: Crack-like companion/epilogue to "Barely Coping". Barney Stinson is dead and buried. But then the zombie uprising cometh...
AN: This is... probably the second or third weirdest thing I've ever done. Is it possible to out-crack myself? Because this fic is like... crack on LSD. And it's bilingual! And, very very probably, makes little or no sense. I'm really not sure about this story at all... some kind of feedback would be fantastic.
Being dead was really the least awesome thing to have ever happened to him, Barney thought idly after lying there for he didn’t know how long. Time had ceased to have any meaning down wherever he was; it could have been an hour, or a day, or ten years since he’d died. He didn’t really have any way of keeping that straight any more.
He was trapped in a box, which was so small he couldn’t move an inch. He felt so stiff, not from rigor mortis, but from being squished in this casket for so long. His arms were pinned to his sides, his legs ached from not being able to move them, and it felt like he had a bruise on his forehead from all the times he’d accidentally hit it against the lid of the coffin trying to sit up. His bare skin (you mean they’d actually taken his comment about getting buried naked seriously?) was so cold it felt like it was made of ice, but somehow he wasn’t shivering.
And it was so dark that he could barely see the padded coffin lid that rested just a few inches from the end of his nose. He was six feet underground… there was no light source to be had at all. He was inwardly thankful that he’d gotten over his claustrophobia and fear of the dark years earlier; if he hadn’t, he would have been so terrified he would have wanted to die - again.
But as it was, lying motionless in the dark for hours/days/years on end was by far the most boring thing he’d ever done.
His only neighbor appeared to be a young Hispanic man buried some three feet to his right, and so far he hadn’t been very good company. Half the time he spoke in rapid, fluent Spanish, and the only Spanish Barney knew, besides the pidgin Spanish that any kid growing up in New York picked up, was “Estoy enamorado con tacos.” And when the man wasn’t speaking Spanish, he was moaning and groaning and bitching about being dead. After an hour (maybe? it had felt that long, anyway) of interrogating him over his manic-depressive wailing, Barney had learned the man’s name was Juan Preciado, and if Barney could reach him or even see him at all, he would have strangled him long ago. But unfortunately, his only contact with the man was by way of his whiny, miserable voice.
Juan Preciado was always complaining about how he’d died: arriving in some deserted Mexican town looking for his bastard of a father, and how Juan had ended up dead of fright, somehow. Which was potentially a pretty interesting story, if Juan hadn’t told it in a completely roundabout and confusing way, and if he hadn’t kept interrupting the story with a variety of Spanish phrases Barney didn’t have a prayer of understanding but which all seemed to have sentiments along the lines of “I want to cut myself”.
Barney wasn’t exactly thrilled about being dead either, but he wasn’t about to complain about it constantly. Juan had been dead for over fifty years; you’d think he would have gotten over it by now.
And there didn’t seem to be anyone else around to talk to. Juan had probably scared them all into silence, Barney thought dully. He was dying - heh - for some real conversation.
So, trapped in this dark box unable to move, Barney had started searching for some way to keep himself occupied.
He’d begun singing to himself, just so he’d have something to listen to besides Juan’s whining.
“Aruba, Jamaica, ooh, I wanna take ya!” he sang at the top of his lungs, his voice filling the oppressive silence of his coffin. “Bermuda, Bahama, come on, pretty mama…”
“Stop!”
He froze, because that wasn’t Juan at all. He knew that voice so well, because he used to hear it every day, and he’d been longing to hear it again ever since that night he died.
“Robin?” he called at the top of his lungs, because she sounded like she was in pain, and he couldn’t stay away when she needed him as badly as she did at that moment. He tried to get up to go to her, but only succeeded in knocking his head against his coffin lid, and he let out a yelp of pain.
“Robin!” he tried again, wondering where in the world she was. She sounded so far away…
“She cannot hear you,” he heard Juan whisper from beside him. “No one can hear the voices of the ones who live in the world of the spirits…”
“Dude,” Barney sighed, “don’t make me bust out ‘Tomorrow’ again. Seriously, all your doom-and-gloom is harshing my afterlife mellow.”
“There is no afterlife,” Juan moaned. “There is just this limbo.” Barney snickered, thinking of a horizontal pole on a cruise ship when he knew he shouldn’t have been. “We are all trapped here forever…”
“Who’s we? Sounds like you and I are the only ones down here,” Barney said, shuddering with dread at the thought of having to spend eternity with someone so boring and pessimistic and lame, straining his ears for the sounds of someone - ANYONE - else.
Seriously, he was in a cemetery full of other dead people. Why didn’t anyone else seem to be around?
---
“…leaving dozens dead and several hundred more injured,” the field reporter was saying. “Authorities are asking that people in the downtown area take special precautions to protect themselves from this latest zombie uprising -“
“BRAINS!!!!”
The reporter screamed in terror as three or four zombies launched themselves upon her, and the camera quickly cut back to the studio.
“Thanks, Janine,” the Metro News One anchor said with a pasted-on reporter smile. “Onto our top story: kittens on parade!”
The TV went dead as the lights in MacLaren’s went out. Lily, Marshall, and Ted were huddled under the table for protection as a zombie-human war raged outside.
“How many more of these zombie uprising things are we going to have to live through?” Lily asked loudly over the growling of the hungry zombies outside their bar.
“I know,” Marshall said. “I mean, there weren’t supposed to be any more zombie uprisings until 2046 at the very earliest!”
Ted winced as one of the zombies smashed its arm through the wood of the door; the bartender repelled it with a blast of his flamethrower. He sincerely hoped that, wherever she was, Robin was safe from this kind of zombie carnage.
---
Zombies were swarming all over the luggage carousels, attacking ticket takers, flight attendants, and passengers. Everyone was running away in terror, calling out for their loved ones, or else finding some kind of weapon to fight off the zombies with.
Robin was quite firmly in the third category.
And luckily, the Newark gift shop was selling machine guns for the travelers’ convenience. Normally, airports would have been much stricter about the sale of firearms, but zombies were everywhere, man. It was a national emergency.
“Take that, motherFUCKERS!!” she roared at the invading horde, blasting away at the zombies with the machine gun at her hip. She mowed several of them down, causing the rest of the zombies to shuffle away in self-preservation, still moaning inarticulately.
Robin looked at the re-deaded undead in distaste. Their flesh was hanging off their bones in graying folds, their hair was filthy and matted with dirt and their clothes were tattered, and some of them had eyeballs falling out of their sockets. It was a disgusting sight to behold.
She really hoped he wouldn’t look like that.
---
Somehow, the rest of the cemetery’s residents - was that even a good word to describe an evil army of the undead? - had escaped, but he was still trapped inside his coffin. The lid must have been stuck, he thought angrily.
Juan’s moans cut through the sound of his own singing. “Ay, ¡qué muerte más perra!”
Barney’s eyes widened in horror… Juan was at his emo-ness again. He pounded his fists against the inside of the coffin lid in yet another feeble attempt to escape, but of course nothing happened.
Kill me now, he thought desperately… but then he remembered he was already dead. Damn it!
He was completely and utterly trapped. There was no escape from his coffin OR from Juan, so he tried the next best thing…
“The city is at war!” Barney sang at the very top of his lungs. “Playtime for the young and rich… ignore me if you see me, ‘cause I just don’t give a shit!”
Juan interrupted his song with a moan muffled by the earth between their coffins. “No estamos en el cielo ni en el infierno… estamos entrapados en el purgatorio para eternidad…”
“Um, rockupied!” Barney yelled over to him in annoyance.
Juan wasn’t listening.
“Ay, dios mío… no sé a quién es Chona, y ella es una personaje secundaria en el narrativo así que no me importa, pero ¿por qué está presente en la novela? Es bastante confusa sin ella porque de los cambios en perspectivo y tiempo.”
Barney glared sideways at the wall of his coffin, imagining he was boring a hole right through it to where Juan was so he could give him a death glare and kill him for good. But that wasn’t an effective way of drowning out his moans, because obviously Juan couldn’t see him. So instead he began to bellow,
“Shot through the heart! And you’re to blame…”
His awesome voice drowned out Juan’s bilingual bitchery, though he knew Juan would keep going on and on regardless of whether or not anyone was listening.
Between Juan’s incessant whining and his increasing desperation to escape… Barney was definitely not resting in peace.
Adelante...
Word Count: This part: 1630
Rating: PG-15 for zombie carnage and language... and general weirdness.
Written for: The lovely loquaciousambie, and anyone who's ever been traumatized by "Barely Coping".
Summary: Crack-like companion/epilogue to "Barely Coping". Barney Stinson is dead and buried. But then the zombie uprising cometh...
AN: This is... probably the second or third weirdest thing I've ever done. Is it possible to out-crack myself? Because this fic is like... crack on LSD. And it's bilingual! And, very very probably, makes little or no sense. I'm really not sure about this story at all... some kind of feedback would be fantastic.
Being dead was really the least awesome thing to have ever happened to him, Barney thought idly after lying there for he didn’t know how long. Time had ceased to have any meaning down wherever he was; it could have been an hour, or a day, or ten years since he’d died. He didn’t really have any way of keeping that straight any more.
He was trapped in a box, which was so small he couldn’t move an inch. He felt so stiff, not from rigor mortis, but from being squished in this casket for so long. His arms were pinned to his sides, his legs ached from not being able to move them, and it felt like he had a bruise on his forehead from all the times he’d accidentally hit it against the lid of the coffin trying to sit up. His bare skin (you mean they’d actually taken his comment about getting buried naked seriously?) was so cold it felt like it was made of ice, but somehow he wasn’t shivering.
And it was so dark that he could barely see the padded coffin lid that rested just a few inches from the end of his nose. He was six feet underground… there was no light source to be had at all. He was inwardly thankful that he’d gotten over his claustrophobia and fear of the dark years earlier; if he hadn’t, he would have been so terrified he would have wanted to die - again.
But as it was, lying motionless in the dark for hours/days/years on end was by far the most boring thing he’d ever done.
His only neighbor appeared to be a young Hispanic man buried some three feet to his right, and so far he hadn’t been very good company. Half the time he spoke in rapid, fluent Spanish, and the only Spanish Barney knew, besides the pidgin Spanish that any kid growing up in New York picked up, was “Estoy enamorado con tacos.” And when the man wasn’t speaking Spanish, he was moaning and groaning and bitching about being dead. After an hour (maybe? it had felt that long, anyway) of interrogating him over his manic-depressive wailing, Barney had learned the man’s name was Juan Preciado, and if Barney could reach him or even see him at all, he would have strangled him long ago. But unfortunately, his only contact with the man was by way of his whiny, miserable voice.
Juan Preciado was always complaining about how he’d died: arriving in some deserted Mexican town looking for his bastard of a father, and how Juan had ended up dead of fright, somehow. Which was potentially a pretty interesting story, if Juan hadn’t told it in a completely roundabout and confusing way, and if he hadn’t kept interrupting the story with a variety of Spanish phrases Barney didn’t have a prayer of understanding but which all seemed to have sentiments along the lines of “I want to cut myself”.
Barney wasn’t exactly thrilled about being dead either, but he wasn’t about to complain about it constantly. Juan had been dead for over fifty years; you’d think he would have gotten over it by now.
And there didn’t seem to be anyone else around to talk to. Juan had probably scared them all into silence, Barney thought dully. He was dying - heh - for some real conversation.
So, trapped in this dark box unable to move, Barney had started searching for some way to keep himself occupied.
He’d begun singing to himself, just so he’d have something to listen to besides Juan’s whining.
“Aruba, Jamaica, ooh, I wanna take ya!” he sang at the top of his lungs, his voice filling the oppressive silence of his coffin. “Bermuda, Bahama, come on, pretty mama…”
“Stop!”
He froze, because that wasn’t Juan at all. He knew that voice so well, because he used to hear it every day, and he’d been longing to hear it again ever since that night he died.
“Robin?” he called at the top of his lungs, because she sounded like she was in pain, and he couldn’t stay away when she needed him as badly as she did at that moment. He tried to get up to go to her, but only succeeded in knocking his head against his coffin lid, and he let out a yelp of pain.
“Robin!” he tried again, wondering where in the world she was. She sounded so far away…
“She cannot hear you,” he heard Juan whisper from beside him. “No one can hear the voices of the ones who live in the world of the spirits…”
“Dude,” Barney sighed, “don’t make me bust out ‘Tomorrow’ again. Seriously, all your doom-and-gloom is harshing my afterlife mellow.”
“There is no afterlife,” Juan moaned. “There is just this limbo.” Barney snickered, thinking of a horizontal pole on a cruise ship when he knew he shouldn’t have been. “We are all trapped here forever…”
“Who’s we? Sounds like you and I are the only ones down here,” Barney said, shuddering with dread at the thought of having to spend eternity with someone so boring and pessimistic and lame, straining his ears for the sounds of someone - ANYONE - else.
Seriously, he was in a cemetery full of other dead people. Why didn’t anyone else seem to be around?
---
“…leaving dozens dead and several hundred more injured,” the field reporter was saying. “Authorities are asking that people in the downtown area take special precautions to protect themselves from this latest zombie uprising -“
“BRAINS!!!!”
The reporter screamed in terror as three or four zombies launched themselves upon her, and the camera quickly cut back to the studio.
“Thanks, Janine,” the Metro News One anchor said with a pasted-on reporter smile. “Onto our top story: kittens on parade!”
The TV went dead as the lights in MacLaren’s went out. Lily, Marshall, and Ted were huddled under the table for protection as a zombie-human war raged outside.
“How many more of these zombie uprising things are we going to have to live through?” Lily asked loudly over the growling of the hungry zombies outside their bar.
“I know,” Marshall said. “I mean, there weren’t supposed to be any more zombie uprisings until 2046 at the very earliest!”
Ted winced as one of the zombies smashed its arm through the wood of the door; the bartender repelled it with a blast of his flamethrower. He sincerely hoped that, wherever she was, Robin was safe from this kind of zombie carnage.
---
Zombies were swarming all over the luggage carousels, attacking ticket takers, flight attendants, and passengers. Everyone was running away in terror, calling out for their loved ones, or else finding some kind of weapon to fight off the zombies with.
Robin was quite firmly in the third category.
And luckily, the Newark gift shop was selling machine guns for the travelers’ convenience. Normally, airports would have been much stricter about the sale of firearms, but zombies were everywhere, man. It was a national emergency.
“Take that, motherFUCKERS!!” she roared at the invading horde, blasting away at the zombies with the machine gun at her hip. She mowed several of them down, causing the rest of the zombies to shuffle away in self-preservation, still moaning inarticulately.
Robin looked at the re-deaded undead in distaste. Their flesh was hanging off their bones in graying folds, their hair was filthy and matted with dirt and their clothes were tattered, and some of them had eyeballs falling out of their sockets. It was a disgusting sight to behold.
She really hoped he wouldn’t look like that.
---
Somehow, the rest of the cemetery’s residents - was that even a good word to describe an evil army of the undead? - had escaped, but he was still trapped inside his coffin. The lid must have been stuck, he thought angrily.
Juan’s moans cut through the sound of his own singing. “Ay, ¡qué muerte más perra!”
Barney’s eyes widened in horror… Juan was at his emo-ness again. He pounded his fists against the inside of the coffin lid in yet another feeble attempt to escape, but of course nothing happened.
Kill me now, he thought desperately… but then he remembered he was already dead. Damn it!
He was completely and utterly trapped. There was no escape from his coffin OR from Juan, so he tried the next best thing…
“The city is at war!” Barney sang at the very top of his lungs. “Playtime for the young and rich… ignore me if you see me, ‘cause I just don’t give a shit!”
Juan interrupted his song with a moan muffled by the earth between their coffins. “No estamos en el cielo ni en el infierno… estamos entrapados en el purgatorio para eternidad…”
“Um, rockupied!” Barney yelled over to him in annoyance.
Juan wasn’t listening.
“Ay, dios mío… no sé a quién es Chona, y ella es una personaje secundaria en el narrativo así que no me importa, pero ¿por qué está presente en la novela? Es bastante confusa sin ella porque de los cambios en perspectivo y tiempo.”
Barney glared sideways at the wall of his coffin, imagining he was boring a hole right through it to where Juan was so he could give him a death glare and kill him for good. But that wasn’t an effective way of drowning out his moans, because obviously Juan couldn’t see him. So instead he began to bellow,
“Shot through the heart! And you’re to blame…”
His awesome voice drowned out Juan’s bilingual bitchery, though he knew Juan would keep going on and on regardless of whether or not anyone was listening.
Between Juan’s incessant whining and his increasing desperation to escape… Barney was definitely not resting in peace.
Adelante...